

Book_i_p25 



COPYRIGHT 



i 



LITTLE LEADERS 



LITTLE LEADERS 



BY 



WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 




DEClPlflp^; * 



CHICAGO 

WAY & WILLIAMS 

1895 



c 



n 



?Nsn\ 
.Tar 



COPYRIGHT 

BY WAY AND WILLIAMS 

MDCCCXCV 



TO MY OLD FRIEND AND FELLOW-WORKER 
FRANCIS FISHER BROWNE 

WHO HAS DONE MORE THAN ANY OTHER 

MAN TO PROMOTE THE INTERESTS 

OF LITERATURE IN 

CHICAGO 



PREFACE. 

The contents of this little book consist of a series of 
papers reprinted from 'The Dial,' in which periodical, 
scattered through the past three years, they first did duty 
as editorial articles. The title now given to the collec- 
tion is thus accounted for, as well as the use of the plural 
pronoun, which it seemed best to retain. The papers 
make no pretence of doing more than touch the skirts and 
fringes of the great subjects with which they are con- 
cerned, and whatever readers they may reach are asked 
to bear this fact indulgently in mind. They are repro- 
duced substantially as they appeared, with but trifling 
alterations. Two of them, it should be added, have 
been incorporated into the introduction of the book 
' English in American Universities/ edited by their au- 
thor, and very recently published. 

Chicago, November i, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



LITERATURE AND CRITICISM. 

Sonnet — Ej Blot til Lyst. 
Literature on the Stage . 
The Ibsen Legend . . . 
The Cult in Literature . 
The Literary West . . . 
The Writer and His Hire 
The Critic and His Task 
Touchstones of Criticism 
Anonymity in Literary Criticism 
Poetry as Criticism of Literature 
The Neglected Art of Translation 



page 
13 

*3 
31 
40 

49 
S* 
62 

7* 
81 
90 



EDUCATION. 
Sonnet — The Higher Aim. 
A Few Words about Education 
The Approach to Literature . 
The Teaching of Literature . 
Democracy and Education . . 
The Future of American Speech 
The Use and Abuse of Dialect 



101 

109 
117 
127 
136 
146 



x. CONTENTS— Continued. 

PAGE 

Reading and Education 155 

Summer Reading 163 

The Summer School 169 

An Endowed Newspaper 178 

IN MEMORIAM. 
Sonnet — Conservation. 

Alfred Tennyson 189 

Ernest Renan 200 

HlPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TaINE 209 

Gustav Freytag 220 

John Addington Symonds 429 

Christina Georgina Rossetti 237 

John Tyndall 246 

Thomas Henry Huxley 255 

Oliver Wendell Holmes 264 

William Frederick Poole 270 



LITERATURE AND CRITICISM 



J 



< EJ BLOT TIL LYST.' 

[These words, meaning «Not for pleasure only,* are 
inscribed above the stage of the Royal Theatre at Copen- 
hagen.] 

Not merely for our pleasure, but to purge 
The soul from baseness, from ignoble fear, 
And all the passions that make dim the clear 

Calm vision of the world ; our feet to urge 

On to ideal far-set goals ; to merge 

Our being with the heart of things ; brought 

near 
The springs of life, to make us see and hear 

And feel its swelling and pulsating surge : — 

Such, Thespian art divine, thy nobler aim ; 
For this the tale of CEdipus was told, 
Of frenzied Lear, Harpagon's greed of gold ; — 

And, knowing this, how must we view with shame 
Thy low estate, and hear the plaudits loud 
That mark thee now but pander to the crowd ! 









LITERATURE ON THE STAGE. 

There has been of late, both in England and 
America, one of the periodically recurrent out- 
bursts of criticism and discussion of the English- 
speaking stage, its present degradation, and its 
possible future redemption. Attention has been 
called, in all possible tones of indignation, to the 
old familiar facts; to the evils of the 'star' sys- 
tem, to the alarming prominence of the spectac- 
ular element in dramatic production, and to the 
insistence of the public upon being amused, at 
whatever cost of the artistic proprieties. That all 
these evils exist, and many more, is evident to the 
most casual observer. The theatrical records of 
London, New York, and Chicago, alike give evi- 
dence of a noble art degenerated into a mere 
amusement, and of the almost complete severance 
of literature from the stage. But talking about 
these evils is not likely to prove effective in re- 
moving them. The talking will be done by a 
few earnest people, and the unthinking masses 



14 Little Leaders 

will give, as before, the sanction of their support 
to the dramatic monstrosities that chiefly occupy 
our stage. Discussion of the subject but sup- 
plies, after all, a new illustration of the homely 
saying that ' a watched pot never boils '; in other 
words, the kingdom of true dramatic art, like a 
certain other kingdom, cometh not with observ- 
ation. The great periods of the art, when liter- 
ture securely trod the stage, did not result from 
a deliberate and reasoned conclusion that such art 
was a desirable possession, but were the sponta- 
neous product of a heightened national conscious- 
ness seeking for adequate expression. Such ex- 
pression was found in the ages and countries of 
Pericles and of Louis Quatorze, in the period of 
Spanish history that culminated with the glories 
of Calderon and Lope de Vega, and at the time 
of that vast expansion of the English spirit which 
produced Marlowe and Webster and Shakespeare. 
We may well wonder what manner of men they 
were who flocked to their rude theatres in ' the 
spacious times of great Elizabeth,' and shared, 
with no adventitious spectacular allurements to 
serve as a fillip, in the pure intellectual delight 
offered by c The Tempest ' or c A Midsummer 



Literature and Criticism 15 

Night's Dream.' As Mr. Symonds says, ' There 
remains always something inscrutable in the spon- 
taneous efforts of a nation finely touched to a fine 
issue.' 

The stage of to-day certainly does not give us, 
in England and America, any indication of c a na- 
tion finely touched to a fine issue.' The play- 
wright, not the poet, the contriver of puppets, not 
the creator of characters, occupies the higher plane 
of our existing dramatic art, while the lower plane 
is hopelessly given over to the buffoon, who acts 
after his kind. The situation is much better upon 
the continent of Europe, for there, at least, the 
stage has an unbroken and dignified tradition. If 
it can boast few living writers of great distinction, 
it still preserves its character as a school of con- 
scientious acting, of correct diction, and of accu- 
rate enunciation. As a conservator of the national 
speech the Theatre Francais is as important and 
influential a body as the Academie Francaise, 
while a similar function is fulfilled by the theatres 
of many German cities and of the Scandinavian 
capitals. To realize what this means, we have 
only to imagine the derision that would greet the 
proposal to decide some disputed question of En- 



1 6 Little Leaders 

glish style or pronunciation by reference to the 
practise of the stage in any English or American 
city. The explanation of this difference is, of 
course, largely political. The chief European 
governments have always held the stage to be an 
educational institution, and, as such, a legitimate 
object of government support. The noble motto 
of the Danish national theatre has been made the 
working rule of the government-aided European 
stage. The Theatre Francais permits no week 
to pass without performance of some work by 
Corneille, Racine, or Moliere ; the court theatres 
of Austria and Germany as frequently produce 
the plays of Lessing and Schiller, of Goethe and 
Shakespeare. But in no theatre of the English- 
speaking world is the presentation of Shakespear- 
ian drama thus made a matter of fixed weekly or 
even monthly recurrence. Germany pays more 
reverence than we do to our own dramatic poet, 
to the chief glory of all dramatic literature. 

One might suppose that this neglect of a great 
art would have long since led to the disappearance 
of the drama from our literature. But the essen- 
tial vitality of the dramatic form, and the inherent 
fitness of our English speech to assume that mode 



Literature and Criticism 17 

of expression, have given us, in spite of all dis- 
couragements, an almost unbroken succession of 
noble dramatic poems. Although our century 
refuses to witness stage productions of the great 
works of English dramatic literature, and although 
they are denied the support of even the reading 
public, they are still produced in numbers, for the 
instinct of the poet well knows the value of dra- 
matic expression, and he will not abandon it, how- 
ever the public may scorn the product of his 
labors. Such poems as 'The Cenci ' of Shelley 
and the ' Count Julian ' of Landor, or the plays 
of Browning and Mr. Swinburne, had they been 
written by Frenchmen or Germans, would not 
have had to wait long before taking their proper 
places in the classic repertory of the stage. And 
the greatest poet of our own age, had he not been 
English, would have obtained more than a grudg- 
ing recognition, as fitted for stage purposes, of but 
one or two of the magnificent series of his histor- 
ical and romantic dramas. Had a German poet 
written c Harold ' and c Becket,' or a French 
poet written ' The Foresters/ these works would 
have had more than a cold succes d'estime, for 
they would have reached a public quick to recog- 



1 8 Little Leaders 

nize literary excellence in the drama, and prompt 
to express its approval of noble workmanship. In 
excellent dramatic work of a rank lower than the 
first, our nineteenth century literature is also rich, 
and to a degree which few readers and no mere 
theatre-goers suspect. Such plays as Sergeant 
Talfourd's ' Ion ' and Dean Milman's c Fazio,' 
both of which once had a precarious tenure of the 
stage, well deserve to be revived ; the dramatic 
poems of Sir Henry Taylor, Richard Hengist 
Home, and Westland Marston,are infinitely more 
deserving of attention than nine-tenths of the plays 
actually produced upon our stage. But they would 
be caviare to the general audience, hopelessly dull 
in appreciation of style, and trained to prefer buf- 
foonery to comedy, melodrama to tragedy, or, at 
the very best, sentiment to passion. 

The almost complete severance of literature 
from the English stage is clearly enough shown 
by the fact that the dramatic works of Tennyson 
have never succeeded in gaining a foothold there. 
If a still more striking illustration is wished, it 
can be furnished by the experience of the Shelley 
Society in its attempts to produce ' The Cenci.' 
According to English law, only licensed plays 



Literature and Criticism 19 

may be publicly produced. An unlicensed play 
may be given private performance, a term which 
means that no money shall be taken at the doors 
of the theatre, but which is otherwise so conven- 
iently vague that any such performance, arranged 
in the best of faith, may be undertaken only at 
considerable risk of violating the law in some un- 
suspected way. 'The Cenci,' we must add, the 
greatest English dramatic poem of the century, 
has been steadily refused a license by the English 
authorities, although several applications to legal- 
ize its performance have been made. In 1886, 
the Shelley Society gave a private performance of 
c The Cenci ' in a London theatre, in presence 
of perhaps the most distinguished audience that 
recent years have seen collected for any purpose 
whatever. But the outraged dignity of the cen- 
sorship was prompt to act, and the manager of 
the theatre in question was allowed to continue his 
lease only on condition of never thereafter lend- 
ing his stage for the production of an unlicensed 
play. In the centennial year of the birth of Shel- 
ley, the Society wished to commemorate the oc- 
casion by a repetition of the c Cenci ' perform- 
ance, but found it impossible either to get the 



20 Little Leaders 

play licensed for public representation, or to find 
a manager willing to risk lending his theatre for 
the private performance contemplated. So the 
plan was abandoned, and a fresh victory scored 
for the hosts of the Philistine. 

When matters reach such a pass as this, it cer- 
tainly behooves the friends of literature to see if 
something cannot be done to rehabilitate the stage. 
It is not a little significant that an Independent 
Theatre should have been organized in London 
a few years ago, and that some of the more 
thoughtful literary men of this country should, at 
about the same time, have united to establish in 
New York the Theatre of Arts and Letters. 
The still older Theatre Libre of Paris, and the 
more recent Theatre de l" CEuvre, might at first 
seem to deserve mention in this category, but cer- 
tainlv have not resulted from a similar necessity, 
for French dramatic art needs no such encour- 
agement. But the London and New York or- 
ganizations adopted what is probably the best 
method, in a country the genius of whose institu- 
tions hardly admits of a stage subsidized by the 
government, for the furtherance of an important 
and neglected cause. The untimely collapse of 



Literature and Criticism 21 

the Theatre of Arts and Letters seems to have 
resulted rather from bad management than from 
any fault of the underlying principle. Its pro- 
gramme, and the names of the men who stood 
sponsors for its plans, promised a serious aim, and 
the employment of methods consistent with both 
the dignity of literature and the best dramatic tra- 
ditions. The most valuable work done by the 
Independent Theatre of London was the produc- 
tion of several of Dr. Ibsen's dramas of modern 
society, which certainly represent a tendency in 
dramatic art deserving of encouragement. Its 
production of Webster's c Duchess of Malfy ' 
was another step in the right direction, reminding 
us that the century which has partly neglected 
Shakespeare has totally neglected the other men 
of that great race of Elizabethans above whose 
level it required the stature of a Shakespeare to 
tower. The later organization known as the 
Elizabethan Stage Society, whose object is the 
presentation of Elizabethan plays under sixteenth 
century conditions, has also undertaken a work of 
great educational importance. Last of all, we 
may mention the recent performance, under the 
auspices of the English Department of Harvard 



22 Little Leaders 

University, of Jonson's c Silent Woman.' The 
success of this experiment was such as to encour- 
age other colleges to similar undertakings. Both 
in England and America, we have for many years 
had the 'Greek Play' and the 'Latin Play,' 
as occasional features of college work ; is not the 
'English Play' quite as deserving of attention, 
even from a strictly educational standpoint ? 



Literature and Criticism 23 



THE IBSEN LEGEND. 

One of the most curious chapters of literary 
history is that which deals with the greatest of 
Roman poets as he appeared to the imagination 
of the Middle Ages. The Master Virgil of me- 
diaevalism stands out as a vivid enough figure, 
exerting a marked influence upon the current of 
mediaeval thought ; yet how unlike the personality 
of the Mantuan as he appears to us, with our 
fuller knowledge of classical times, and the truer 
intellectual perspective of our view. It was a 
singular refraction, indeed, that shaped the out- 
lines of the poet into the distorted figure of the 
wizard, a strange limitation of outlook that in so 
literal a sense made of his name a word with which 
to conjure, while blind to his genius and its true 
significance. Books have their fates, runs the 
Latin saying, and presumably their authors no 
less. But never was the fate of bookman more 
ironical than that of the poet of the 'jEneid' and 
the c Fourth Eclogue,' envisaged, a thousand 



24 Little Leaders 

years after his death, as an allegorist and a won- 
der-worker. 

It is a far cry, in more ways than one, from 
Virgil to Dr. Ibsen, and there is but a single fact 
that could lead us even for a moment to couple 
their names. That fact is the prevalence and 
seemingly continued growth, at least in England 
and America, of an Ibsen legend, grotesquely 
divergent from the truth, and calculated to make 
of the Norwegian poet and dramatist a figure as 
unlike his real self as Master Virgil was unlike 
the poet who chiefly made glorious the Augustan 
Age. Our newspapers, and even some of our 
serious organs of opinion, afford frequent indica- 
tions that the popular consciousness holds Dr. 
Ibsen to be the poet of gloom, of the morbid 
aspects of character, of the seamy side of life and 
the unsavory among human relations. A Ger- 
man sensationalist, long discredited, but whose 
latest work has recently been getting much atten- 
tion, finds in Dr. Ibsen a conspicuous illustration 
of what he calls Entartung. A typical news- 
paper article just now under our eye, an article of 
the better sort and evidently written in all seri- 
ousness, calls him 'grim' and ' egotistical,' speaks 



Literature and Criticism 25 

of his c icy indifference/ his c dank philosophy,' 
and his ' intolerable pessimism.' No one who 
does much reading in current criticism can have 
failed more than once to come across even the 
suggestion that he deliberately panders to the 
lower instincts of human nature, that he revels 
in what is revolting and unclean. 

Anyone who has read the writings of Dr. Ib- 
son, and who knows something of the aims and 
ideals that they embody, rubs his eyes in wonder- 
ment when he meets with such epithets and opin- 
ions as have just been mentioned. But when 
amazement at the misconception has a little 
abated, he is apt to ask himself if there is any 
possible way of accounting for the origin of opin- 
ions so grotesque, unless, indeed, he summarily 
sets them down as adding another to the many 
existing illustrations of the essential irrationality 
of the majority of minds. The last count of the 
indictment above outlined may safely be left to 
shift for itself. There is no shred of evidence 
for it, and no sane mind could for a moment 
seriously entertain the suggestion. Nor is it with- 
out reluctance that we so far consider the poet's 
c icy indifference ' as to recall the infinite tender- 



26 Little Leaders 

ness of c Brand ' and ' Peer Gym,' or illustrate 
his c dank philosophy ' by the passionate idealism 
of c Love's Comedy ' and c Emperor and Galilean.' 
The reader is to be pitied, indeed, who is not 
stirred to the depths of his soul by the agonies 
of Brand as child and wife are taken from him 
one after the other, or by that vision of the c third 
kingdom ' which, in the story of Julian, casts its 
mystical glamour over the last struggle of dying 
paganism, and which might have been inspired 
by the choruses of Shelley's c Hellas.' 

The last of these illustrations leads us to the 
subject upon which more than a word or a refer- 
ence is needed. Of all the charges commonly 
made against Dr. Ibsen, that of pessimism is 
probably the most persistent. This is not sur- 
prising when we consider the ignorant way in 
which that term is bandied about by most people, 
yet here, if ever, the accusation calls for an ener- 
getic protest. Pessimism is both a mood and a 
philosophical doctrine. Whatever standing it has, 
considered in its latter aspect, it owes to the au- 
thority of Schopenhauer, who, by logic convinc- 
ing at least to himself, thought he had demon- 
strated the soul of things to be evil, believed 



Literature and Criticism 27 

irremediable suffering to lie at the root of con- 
scious existence. To this doctrine the whole of 
Dr. Ibsen's work is tacitly but resolutely opposed. 
He never presents to us the gloomy side of life 
without suggesting the possibility of something 
better, rarely without indicating the way out of 
what seems an impasse to the soul of little faith. 
So far from preaching evil as irremediable, he con- 
stantly ascribes it to lack of knowledge, infirmity 
of vision, and weakness of will. If there is any 
one trait dominant above all others throughout 
his writings, it is the persistent note of an ideal- 
ism unshaken by 

« The absurdity of men, 
Their vaunts, their feats,* 

an idealism as absolutely opposed as anything well 
can be to the philosophical doctrine of pessimism. 
If Dr. Ibsen is to be styled a pessimist in this 
sense, it must be in the company of all the satir- 
ists, ". icient and modern, who have scourged the 
vices of mankind, and all the moralists who have 
discerned the good life and sought to bring about 
its realization in fact no less than in dream. 

Of pessimism as a mood it may be said that 
Dr. Ibsen exhibits it as it has been exhibited bv 



28 Little Leaders 

greater men than he, from Homer to Tennyson, 
by a large proportion, in fact, of the greatest poets 
that have ever lived. This merely means that he 
does not, like such men as Browning and Emer- 
son, deliberately exclude from his view a large 
share of the facts of human life, that he is not 
content to build for himself a fool's paradise and 
dwell therein. He is not to be deluded by 

1 The barren optimistic sophistries 
Of comfortable moles,' 

and endeavors, according to the light that is in 
him, to see life steadily and see it whole. Like 
all writers of the second or third rank, he has his 
limitations, and his vision is defective; but to 
describe his prevalent mood as pessimistic, or 
even as cynical, is grossly to pervert the truth. 

The principal reasons for the current miscon- 
ception of Dr. Ibsen's fundamental attitude to- 
wards life may be briefly set forth. In the first 
place, much of his work is satirical, and this fact, 
combined with his power of expressing the white 
heat of indignation, naturally makes many people 
think that only one at heart a cynic could find so 
much to condemn in the conduct and the ideals 
of his fellow-men. In the second place, his work 



Literature and Criticism 29 

is nearly all dramatic in form, and dramatists 
always suffer from a more or less unconscious 
identification with the characters of their own 
creation, however objectively conceived. Last 
of all, and most important as far as the English- 
speaking public is concerned, he unfortunately 
first became known, and is still chiefly known, 
by means of a group of his least characteristic 
and enduring works. Most people get their whole 
notion of him from a group of three or four plays 
which deal with extremely narrow and specific 
social problems, which are utterly inadequate to 
convey his essential message, and which embody 
no suggestion of the high poetic energy with 
which his really great work is charged. It is not 
altogether surprising that the ' Ibsen legend ' 
should find credence with readers who know only 
« A Doll Home,' l Ghosts,' ' Hedda Gabler,' and 
c Solness.' To such, and to all who would know 
what Dr. Ibsen really stands for, we proffer the 
advice to read ' Brand ' and c Peer Gynt,' those 
masterpieces of robust social philosophy and high 
ethical aim. Their invigorating moral atmos- 
phere has the tonic quality of which our flabby 
civilization is most in need ; their lofty idealism 



30 Little Leaders 

may well put to shame our opportunism, our half- 
heartedness, and all the paltry conventionalities 
by which our lives are misshapen. And we ven- 
ture to say that whoever once takes those works 
to heart will hardly thereafter describe their au- 
thor as a pessimist, or talk glibly of his c icy in- 
difference ' and his c dank philosophy.' For such 
readers, at least, the c Ibsen legend ' will be at 
once consigned to the limbo to which grown-up 
men and women relegate the nursery tales and 
pious fables that were literally accepted in child- 
hood, but that cannot impose upon the rational- 
ized adult intelligence. 



Literature and Criticism 31 



THE CULT IN LITERATURE. 

The great poets are all dead now, and appear- 
ances indicate that the twentieth century will be- 
gin its course undominated by any commanding 
figure bequeathed to it from the literature of the 
nineteenth. No Goethe will loom above that 
new horizon as in the early dawn of the present 
century ; no Scott is likely to brighten the morn- 
ing clouds of the new era with the radiance of his 
genius. We cannot, of course, make any such 
predictions with absolute confidence that the fu- 
ture will justify them, for the individual manifes- 
tations of genius are as incalculable as are the 
flashings out of new stars, or the appearance 
within the solar system of unfamiliar cometary 
visitors ; but we cannot, on the other hand, set 
aside the manifest lesson of literary history, the 
lesson that all great creative periods must end; 
that, viewing the whole course of thought, such 
periods are but few and far apart in the annals of 
mankind. And, however ingeniously theories of 



32 Little Leaders 

environment and ripeness for intellectual activity 
may explain the creative epochs of the past, no 
such theory is likely to receive formulation suffi- 
ciently precise to make it an accepted organon for 
the uses of forecast. 

The creative period of German literature 
would have ended abruptly with the death of 
Goethe had not the genius of Heine given it fitful 
renewal of life for another quarter-century. In 
France, the modern creative period was clearly 
over when Hugo died. And in our own litera- 
ture, it seems almost equally clear that the death 
of Tennyson has closed the Victorian age of let- 
ters, an age prolonged beyond the limits of most 
such periods of intellectual expansion, and one 
that, if our assumption be just, has c made a good 
end.' 

What may be expected to follow the period 
thus terminated ? Whatever the literature to 
whose history we turn, we receive the same an- 
swer. After the creative age comes the age of 
reflection, the age of interpretation and analysis, 
of grammatical and rhetorical subtleties, of form- 
ulations and classifications, of scientific and imi- 
tative work. It was so with Greece and Rome, 



Literature and Criticism 33 

with fifteenth century Italy, with seventeenth cen- 
tury France and Spain, with post -Elizabethan 
England and post-Goethean Germany. That it 
will be so with the coming age, for France and 
the English-speaking nations, is a proposition at 
least as reasonable as many historical inductions 
that pass unquestioned. 

But if we are passing into such an age we need 
not look upon it altogether with dismay. Those 
who live in such an age are far from conscious 
that theirs is a period of decadence. Intellectual 
activity seems to be heightened rather than de- 
pressed. Works of all sorts are produced and 
find no lack of readers. The Alexandrians 
thought the ' Argonautica ' quite as good a poem 
as the l Odyssey,' and the Florentines were doubt- 
less perfectly sincere in their admiration of Pol- 
iziano. For those whom the Zeitgeist does not 
deceive, there remain for study and enjoyment 
the great works of the past, and there are enough 
of these for the lifelong contentment of any ra- 
tional soul who finds his way to them. The art 
of criticism flourishes, but, although stiffened into 
a body of dogmatic precept, often enough goes 
hand in hand with genuine appreciation. It is not 



34 Little Leaders 

true that, properly to enjoy literature, an age must 
produce literature of its own. If the coming gen- 
eration of English letters were to prove one of 
sterility, the wise should have slight cause for 
regret. It will be a long while before our race 
outgrows the ideals of Shelley and Wordsworth 
and Tennyson ; some of them, it is to be hoped, 
neither our race, nor mankind, will ever outgrow. 
Indeed, the prospect of new masterpieces in un- 
interrupted succession would be rather appalling 
than otherwise. We should despair of catching 
up, and the works made classical by the infalli- 
ble test of time would suffer more neglect than 
they do now. The real interests of culture almost 
demand such breathing-spells as, by a natural law 
no less beneficent than mysterious, follow upon 
the periods that have exhausted themselves in 
giving expression to the struggles of the spirit in 
its ascent from c the sloughs of a low desire.' But 
the critical and reflective age has its dangers, and 
chief among them is the encouragement it gives 
to the ascendency of the cult. 

The literary cult has two principal forms : it 
appears as the unintelligent (because unsympa- 
thetic) worship of a really great writer, or it takes 



Literature and Criticism 35 

the shape of laudation, both undue and uneven, 
of a writer of only secondary importance. In 
the first case, it converts the object of its adora- 
tion into a fetich, worshipping it as such rather 
than as a living spiritual force. In the second case, 
it raises a private altar for the exclusive use of the 
elect, and develops in its adherents a sort of intel- 
lectual priggishness, as satisfactory to them as it 
is amusing to others. A great deal of the mod- 
ern study of Homer and Dante and Shakespeare 
illustrates the first form of the literary cult ; the 
second form receives illustration at many hands, 
the devotees of Browning and Mr. Meredith, of 
Baudelaire and M. Verlaine, of Dr. Ibsen and 
Count Tolstoi, offering a few of the later exam- 
ples. 

We have said that the cult of such writers as 
these takes the shape of a laudation that is both 
undue and uneven. It is upon the second of 
these characteristics that stress should principally 
be laid, for the most astonishing feature of the 
Browning or the Baudelaire or the Ibsen cult is 
its deliberate neglect of the really great qualities 
of these men, and the emphasis given the acci- 
dental and inartistic aspects of their work. No- 



36 Little Leaders 

bier poetry than may be found in the work of 
Browning hardly occurs in English literature, but 
the work of the Browning societies would not 
often lead us to suspect its existence. Baude- 
laire touched with a master hand some of the 
deepest chords of human feeling, but those who 
magnify his name are apt to fix our attention upon 
the charnel - house elements of his verse, and 
almost make us sympathize with the recent sug- 
gestion of M. Brunetiere, that the proposed statue 
of the poet should be placed at the mouth of a 
sewer. Dr. Ibsen, in his deeper moods, speaks 
with an ethical fervor that seems to his readers 
the very bread of life, but those who sing his 
praises in the public ear only ask us to admire 
the trivialities or the morbid features of his analy- 
sis of modern society. It is not surprising that 
a writer like Mr. Frederic Harrison, having, to 
begin with, but little sense of humor, should allow 
his indignation at such critical antics to get the 
better of amusement, and indulge in the follow- 
ing outburst : 

« I know that, in the style of to-day, I ought hardly to 
venture to speak about poetry unless I am prepared to 
unfold the mysterious beauties of some unknown genius 



Literature and Criticism 37 

who has recently been unearthed by the Children of Light 
and Sweetness. I confess I have no such discovery to 
announce. I prefer to dwell in Gath and to pitch my 
tents in Ashdod ; and I doubt the use of the sling as a 
weapon in modern war. I decline to go into hyperbolic 
eccentricities over unknown geniuses, and a single quality 
or power is not enough to rouse my enthusiasm. It is 
possible that no master ever painted a buttercup like this 
one, or the fringe of a robe like that one ; that this poet 
has a unique subtlety, and that an undefinable music. I 
am still unconvinced, though the man who cannot see it, 
we are told, should at once retire to the place where there 
is wailing and gnashing of teeth. ' 

To the first form of the literary cult, the form 
which attaches itself to a really great name, our 
attention is called by a letter from Friedrich Spiel- 
hagen, on the Goethe-Schiller cult in Germany, 
published not long ago in the New York c Na- 
tion.' The cult in question has been going mer- 
rily on for more than half a century, and Herr 
Spielhagen tells us, in substance, that it has been 
fruitful enough in science, but hardly at all in 
literature. 

<I consider,' he says, <as being two very different 
things, learned inquiries about the acts of a hero of gen- 
ius, and the noble, broadening influence and effect of 
these actions on the life and blood, so to speak, of his 



38 Little Leaders 

country. The most painstaking and ingenious commen- 
taries on the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were indited at 
Alexandria, a whole library was filled with them, and yet 
Homer's sun set, and not all this flattering learned art 
could start it on its course again. I fear that much the 
same thing might be said of our Goethe-Schiller cult. 
The old text holds good here : "By their fruits ye shall 
know them." Where, I ask, are the fruits in our art 
and literature which have ripened in the Goethe-Schiller 
sun ? Where do we find in our poetry of to-day Goethe's 
delicate and sure feeling for the beautiful in form ? where 
his really living in the things which he describes ? where 
Schiller's flights of fancy which wafted him high above 
the mean and vulgar, "which enslaves us all"?' 

The true cult of a great poet is very different 
from the form that is commonly practiced. When 
the day of that cult dawns, to quote once more 
from Herr Spielhagen, l it will be understood that 
— always mutatis mutandis — one must do as 
Goethe and Schiller did. Till that day comes, 
let the disciples of Goethe and Schiller go on 
spreading wider and wider their silent influence. 
But, while they keep alive the sacred fire, let 
them have a care not to weaken their cause by 
crying, " Lord, Lord." For nothing is worse 
than publicly proclaiming one's self high-priest 



Literature and Criticism 39 

of the Father in Heaven and then sacrificing to 
Baal/ These words permit of a far wider appli- 
cation than their author gives them, for they indi- 
cate the eternal distinction between the true cult 
and the false in the domain of literature. 



^ 



40 Little Leaders 



THE LITERARY WEST. 

Mr. Lowell's famous essay c On a Certain 
Condescension in Foreigners ' is in need of a sup- 
plement. c A Certain Condescension in East- 
erners ' is a theme that calls for treatment in sim- 
ilar vein ; but the pen rusts that alone could have 
dealt with it adequately, that alone could have 
bestowed upon it the measure and quality of genial 
satire that it deserves. For many years past the 
attitude of Eastern writers towards literary activ- 
ity in the West has been similar to that once as- 
sumed by Boston towards New York, and by 
England towards the United States. It has been 
an attitude of condescension, of patronizing coun- 
sel, of mild surprise that a region so far removed 
from the centre of the intellectual system should 
venture to have such things as literary aspirations. 
c But you are so very far away,' was the naive 
remark recently made to a gathering of American 
scholars by a foreign guest who was trying to be 
complimentary, but who could not refrain from 



Literature and Criticism 41 

coupling surprise with admiration. Most Eastern 
explorers who brave the passes of the Alleghany 
Mountains, and find their way to the intellectual 
frontier settlements of the Mississippi Valley, re- 
turn to their homes with a tale from which the 
element of wonder is rarely missing. Every now 
and then some weekly paper or monthly maga- 
zine of the Atlantic coast devotes an article to 
Western literature, and, whatever the aspect it 
selects for treatment or the writers it singles out 
for fame, the accent of encouragement is always 
marked. 

This display of provincialism is amusing enough 
to all but the few who live in the intellectual cor- 
ners where it originates ; but it has one feature 
which has not been given the prominence that it 
deserves. As far as condescension goes, with its 
patronizing implications, the classical essay already 
mentioned may possibly be thought to cover the 
ground, for, mutatis mutandis^ its criticism is ap- 
plicable to New England narrowness as well as 
to Old England insularity. But the phase of the 
matter which seems to call for particular com- 
ment, and upon which Lowell hardly touched, is 
that illustrated by the kind of literary production 



42 Little Leaders 

which, in both cases, attracts the attention of the 
elder community to the work of the younger. 
Americans are not a little diverted when they 
notice the sort of thing upon which European 
critics of our literature are wont to seize as typ- 
ical of our intellectual activity. c Your country- 
men,' says Richard Grant White, in the charac- 
ter of Mansfield Humphreys, speaking to his 
English fellow-traveller, c even the intelligent and 
kindly-intentioned, are so stung with a craze after 
something peculiarly American from America 
that they refuse to accept anything as American 
that is not extravagant and grotesque. Even in 
literature they accept as American only that which 
is as strange and really as foreign to the tastes and 
habits of the most thoroughbred Americans as it 
is to them.' To this propensity of the European 
we must in large measure attribute the astonish- 
ing transatlantic vogue of Poe and Whitman and 
Mr. Harte. Excellent writers all three, and cer- 
tainly among the foremost that this country has 
produced ; yet it is to their accidental character- 
istics, rather than to their display of the qualities 
common to all good literature, that they in great 
part owe their reputation abroad. To quote once 



Literature and Criticism 43 

more from the writer above mentioned, the for- 
eign critic is constantly putting to our literature 
such a question as this : ' Where is that effluence 
of the new-born individual soul that should em- 
anate from a fresh and independant democracy, 
the possessors of a continent, with a Niagara and 
a Mississippi between two vast oceans ? ' And 
the foreign critic, finding this 'effluence of the 
new-born individual soul ' to emanate very per- 
ceptibly from such a writer as Whitman, seizes 
upon him as a typically American product. To 
the sane student, of course, these characteristics 
of Whitman that so impress the foreigner are the 
husks of his genius ; they are in themselves intol- 
erable, but we put up with them because of the 
fitful flashes of imaginative style that find their 
way through these uncouth wrappings. But the 
foreigner takes the envelope for the substance 5 
while for the American literature that is merely 
good, according to the accepted and immutable 
standards of literary workmanship, he has but 
scant recognition. 

This peculiar attitude of the foreign critic 
toward American writers is closely paralleled by 
the attitude of the East toward the West ; and 



44 Little Leaders 

this brings us to the special subject of our remarks. 
When an Eastern writer undertakes to discuss 
the literary activity of the West, he almost invari- 
ably falls into the error of the foreign critic, and 
singles out as noteworthy and typical the writers 
whose work evinces some sort of eccentricity. 
It may be badly written, it may be grotesque, it 
may be vulgar — it frequently has all three of 
these characteristics, — but it is original, it is 
piquant, it satisfies the unholy yearning for the 
new thing. Some composer of dialect doggerel, 
cheaply pathetic or sentimental, gains the ear of 
the public ; his work has nothing more than nov- 
elty to recommend it, but the advent of a new 
poet is heralded, and we are told by Eastern critics 
that the literary West has at last found a voice. 
Some strong-lunged but untrained product of the 
prairies recounts the monotonous routine of life 
on the farm or in the country town, and is straight- 
way hailed as the apostle of the newest and con- 
sequently the best realism. Some professional 
buffoon strikes a new note of bad taste in the 
columns of the local newspaper, and the admir- 
ing East holds him up as the exemplar of the 
coming humor. Some public lecturer, sure of 



Literature and Criticism 45 

the adulation of his little coterie of followers, 
estimates or interprets the literature of the world 
in accordance with whatever vagaries occupy his 
unregulated fancy, and the surprising announce- 
ment is made that a great creative critic has arisen 
in our midst. Skilled in the arts of self-advertise- 
ment, these men are quick to enlarge the foot- 
hold thus gained ; their reputations grow like 
snowballs : they come to take themselves as seri- 
ously as they are taken by others ; and the peo- 
ple of real culture and refinement, whose num- 
bers are so rapidly increasing in the West, have 
to endure the humiliation of being represented, in 
the minds of a large proportion of their fellow- 
countrymen, by men who are neither cultured 
nor refined. In the meanwhile, hundreds of men 
and women throughtout the West are engaged 
in producing literary work too excellent to be 
obtrusive, work that conforms to the recognized 
standards of all serious writing, work that scorns 
to be effective at the cost of style and modera- 
tion and good taste. But if the average Eastern 
reader be asked who, in his mind, are the repre- 
sentative writers of the West, he will name per- 
sons indignantly repudiated, for the most part, by 



46 



Little Leaders 



Western readers of intelligence and discrimina- 
tion. The selection will doubtless be made in 
good faith, and the fault will not be his ; it will 
be the fault of the newspapers that have supplied 
him with the information, of the careless critics 
who make it a matter of faith that whatever is 
Western must needs be wild. A heavy respon- 
sibility rest with these critics both for the part 
they play in giving notoriety to scribblers who 
offend against art, and for their persistent failure 
to recognize the really praiseworthy work done 
by Western writers. 

We do not claim that this work is as yet very 
great in amount, or that much of it deserves very 
high praise ; but we do claim that it is respect- 
able both in quality and quantity, and that both 
of these facts are to a considerable extent ignored 
by Eastern writers. We expect that the West 
will make a large contribution to American liter- 
ature during the coming ten or twenty years ; and, 
if ever sane criticism is needed, it is at such a 
time. But the criticism we get tends to discour- 
age honest workmanship and to encourage what 
is extravagant and meretricious. Above all, it is 
time to have done with the notion, forced upon 



Literature and Criticisn. 47 

us with wearisome iteration by certair writers, 
both Eastern and Western, that the Wejt is now 
developing, or ever will develope, a distinctive lit- 
erature of its own. The West and the East are 
peopled by the same sort of men and wonen, and 
their work, when it deserves the name of litera- 
ture at all, has, and will have, the characteristics 
common to all good writing in the English lan- 
guage. The distinction between East and West 
will never be other than an artificial oiie ; even 
now, many of the best writers of either section 
came to it from the other. If the natioral centre 
of literary activity follows the Westward path of 
the centre of population, as seems probable, it will 
carry with it the accepted literary tradition, before 
which all crude local growths of tradition will be 
forced to give way. The coming liteiature of 
the West may be largely Western in its themes, 
but it will never be Western in its manner, as 
certain blatant rhetoricians would persuade us. 
Except in their relation to choice of subject-mat- 
ter, the terms Eastern and Western, Northern 
and Southern, have absolutely no literary meaning 
in a country all of whose parts have a common 
speech. The same standards apply to all the lit- 



48 



Little Leaders 



erature written in the English language, whether 
produced ?n England or Australia, in Canada or 
the United States. Still more closely do they ap- 
ply to the literature produced in different sections 
of our country, and it is an unfortunate application 
of local patriotism, whether Eastern or Western, 
that seeks"' to create a distinction where none 
should exf'st, or that, in its endeavor to create 
such a d'ist inction, ignores the necessary unity of 
a national ! literature, and attaches undue weight 
to the accidental qualities of its particular mani- 
festations. 1 



Literature and Criticism 49 



THE WRITER AND HIS HIRE. 

The notion that literary work should not be done 
for pay, that it should be exempted from the com- 
mercial conditions under which man ordinarily 
does service to his fellows, is one that frequently 
finds expression (and sometimes most unexpect- 
edly) among professional men of letters. It has 
more than once proved an obstacle in the path 
of the London Society of Authors, and has prob- 
ably been among the causes that have thus far 
prevented an effective similar organization of the 
literary workers of our own country. Mr. Wal- 
ter Besant has done yeoman service in combat- 
ting this idea among Englishmen, but it seems to 
have something of the hydra's vitality, and the 
severance of one head is but the signal for an- 
other to rear its crest. A recent deliverance upon 
this subject occurs in c Scribner's Magazine,' and 
is of peculiar interest as expressing the opinion of 
a writer who is no less shrewd in the manage- 
ment of his business affairs than accomplished as 



50 Little Leaders 

a man of letters. Mr. Howells (for he it is to 
whom we refer) has a weakness for the paradox- 
ical, and it is not always safe to take him quite 
as seriously as he reads. But his recent discus- 
sion of the literary life in its business aspect is 
prefaced by certain opinions which, allowing for 
an evidently whimsical element in their state- 
ment, still seem to embody the doctrine that it is 
ignoble to write for pay. Mr. Howells is, indeed, 
careful to say that, under existing conditions, a 
writer is bound to take pay for his work ; but he 
vaguely intimates that existing conditions are all 
wrong, that there is something essentially degrad- 
ing in a writer's acceptance of compensation for 
his work, and that in an ideal state of society the 
man of letters would somehow be taken care of 
without sharing in the contentions of the market- 
place. 

We are inclined to think that Mr. Howells 
has not gone far enough in his analysis of the 
problem. The man of letters is, like other men, 
whether Jew or Gentile, ' fed with the same food, 
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same 
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and 
cooled by the same winter and summer.' In a 



Literature and Criticism 51 

word, the man of letters lives, and must have the 
means of subsistence. Shall he live by his pen or 
shall he find other sources of revenue, and leave 
to his hours of leisure the cultivation of litera- 
ture ? Many men of letters, doubtless, have taken 
the latter course ; much of the best literature has 
been produced under such conditions. The very 
best literature will get itself written under the 
most adverse form of these conditions. When, 
once in the centuries, a man has it in him to pro- 
duce a ' Don Quixote ' or a ' Divine Comedy,' 
he will follow the star that lights his soul to the 
accomplishment of its divine purpose. Mr. How- 
ells thinks that Milton was overpaid for his c Par- 
adise Lost,' and doubtless he was, in the sense 
that the bookseller's paltry stipend did nothing 
to strengthen the motive that impelled to the 
composition of the epic. But we must remem- 
ber that literature consists of more than the su- 
preme masterpieces ; that the minor masterpieces 
are serviceable in their way ; and that the work 
of the honest journeyman is not without its uses. 
That the pursuit of literature should be relegated 
to the spare hours of men who earn their living 
otherwise, is a principle hardly to be defended, 



52 Little Leaders 

and Mr. Howells certainly does not mean to have 
us take that view. The application of such a 
principle would spare us many worthless books, 
no doubt ; but it would also deprive us of much 
work, helpful in its generation, that we could ill 
do without. 

But if, on the other hand, literature is a legiti- 
mate profession, an occupation to which it is well 
that many men should devote their best energies 
and their entire lives, there seems to be no good 
reason why it should not fit into the general 
scheme of society and share in the advantages of 
its economic organization. That organization 
may at present work in a way very unsatisfactory 
to the ethical sense, but not even Mr. Howells 
will deny it to be better than the barbarism which 
it has superseded, and to represent a necessary 
stage in the evolution of the civilized life. Mr. 
Howells seems to think that the ideal society of 
the future will somehow take charge of the lit- 
erary artist and care for him as for a public bene- 
factor, that it will provide him with maintenance 
in the Prytaneum. It is here, we think, that the 
analysis is defective. Under anything like the 
existing social organization, such public main- 



Literature and Criticism 53 

tenance would merely shift the burden of the 
artist's support from his own special public to the 
public in general. He would still be paid for his 
work, having merely a new paymaster, probably 
less intelligent than the old one. But under the 
socialistic organization that Mr. Howells prob- 
ably has in mind, we can see no reason why the 
artist should be singled out for special considera- 
tion. The honest ditch-digger is a public bene- 
factor no less than the honest poet, and, if there 
be anything ignoble in the acceptance of pay for 
honest work, it is equally degrading to the man- 
hood of both. All work, whether it be the dig- 
ging of ditches or the writing of epics, is service 
done by man to his fellow-men. There are but 
two things that need concern the worker : let 
him take heed that the work be worth doing, and 
that it be serviceably performed. The real de- 
gradation, whether in literature or in any other 
form of activity, lies either in the doing of work 
that is essentially worthless, or in the doing of 
any kind of work for other than its own sake. 

With the literary worker, the greater danger 
of degradation comes from the second of these 
causes. While we must admit the principle to 



54 Little Leaders 

be legitimate, the frank acceptance of literature 
as a commercial product, to be bought and paid 
for at the market rates, does result in attracting to 
the literary profession a large number of workers 
who have no higher aim than that of turning the 
profession of writing to the greatest possible pe- 
cuniary account. But the moral to be drawn 
from this state of things is precisely the same as 
that to be drawn from any other occupation. 
Work for the mere purpose of gain is always 
ignoble, no matter what sort of work it may be. 
Upon this point, Mr. Ruskin has given us the 
whole ethical doctrine, has interpreted the law 
and the prophets, in his lecture on ' Work/ 

' It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intel- 
lectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of 
his thoughts ; just as it is for him to make his dinner the 
principal object of them. All healthy people like their 
dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their 
lives. So all healthy-minded people like making money 
— ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning 
it : but the main object of their life is not money ; it is 
something better than money. A good soldier, for in- 
stance, mainly wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad 
of his pay — very properly so, and justly grumbles when 
you keep him ten years without it — still, his main notion 
of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning them. 
So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal 






Literature and Criticism 55 

fees, of course ; but yet, if they are brave and well- 
educated, the pew-rent is not the sole object of their lives, 
and the baptismal fee is not the sole purpose of the bap- 
tism j the clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and 
preach, not to be paid for preaching. . . . And so with 
all other brave and rightly-trained men j their work is 
first, their fee second — very important always, but still 
second. But in every nation, as I said, there are a vast 
class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less 
stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee 
is first, and the work second, as with brave people the 
work is first and the fee second.' 

In a word, every man toiling with hand or 
head has the twofold ethical responsibility of 
choosing his work well and of doing it well. But 
in the special case of the literary toiler, the es- 
sence of doing well is to be sincere, truthful, and 
lofty of aim. If his work be done in this spirit, 
he need feel no shame in accepting, or even in 
stipulating for, its just reward, whether he be a 
journalist or a historian, a novelist or a poet. 
And if the time ever comes when all work is 
done in this spirit, we shall probably discover the 
existing social organization, based upon private 
contract and the utmost individual freedom, to be 
the real Utopia of which impatient idealists have 
been dreaming throughout the ages. 



56 Little Leaders 



THE CRITIC AND HIS TASK. 

4 We read far too many poor things,' said Goethe 
to Eckermann, 4 thus losing time and gaining 
nothing.' In similar vein and at greater length, 
Schopenhauer gave vent to this characteristic out- 
burst : 

' The amount of time and paper — their own and other 
people's — wasted by the swarm of mediocre poets, and 
the injurious influence they exercise, are matters deserv- 
ing of serious consideration. For the public is ever ready 
to seize upon novelty, and has a natural proneness for the 
perverse and the dull as most akin to itself. Therefore 
the works of mediocre poets divert public attention, keep- 
ing it away from the true masterpieces and the education 
they offer ; acting in direct antagonism to the benign in- 
fluence of genius, they ruin taste more and more, retard- 
ing the progress of the age. Such poets should there- 
fore receive the scourge of criticism and satire without 
indulgence or sympathy, until led, for their own benefit, 
to apply their talents to reading what is good rather than 
to writing what is bad. For if the bungling of the in- 
competent so aroused the wrath of the gentle Apollo that 
he could flay Marsyas, I do not see upon what the me- 
diocre poet can base his claim to tolerance.' 



Literature and Criticism 57 

In such comment as we have just quoted there 
is a vein of bitterness not altogether to the taste 
of our complacent and easy-going modern age, 
so zealous in bearing witness to its democratic 
faith that it grudges recognition of any aristocracy 
at all, even of one as imprescriptible as that of 
genius. Live and let live, give every man his 
due and a little more, credit the intention rather 
than the performance, are some of the formulas 
in which the modern spirit of comfortable optim- 
ism finds expression. When literary production 
is the subject of criticism there are many motives 
at work in the interest of leniency or excessive 
generosity. Leaving entirely out of the question 
the unabashed puffery, regulated by counting- 
room conditions, that parades as criticism in so 
many of our newspapers ; taking into serious ac- 
count only the critical writing that is, as far as 
conscious purpose goes, honest in its intent ; this 
work is still often weakened by influences too 
insidious in their action to be distinctly felt, yet 
giving it a tendency which, in view of the larger 
interests of the reading public, is undoubtedly per- 
nicious. The critic deficient merely in knowl- 
edge heeds too closely the warning example of 



58 Little Leaders 

the early critics of Shelley and Keats, of Words- 
worth and Tennyson, and casts his anchors to 
windward, hoping thereby to save his reputation 
from the scorn in which theirs stands pilloried. 
The critic whose defects are of the heart rather 
than of the intellect, who is too amenable to social 
influences or of too kindly a disposition to give the 
work under examination the character he knows 
it to possess, softens the outlines of truth (often 
quite unconsciously), and produces a distinctly 
false impression. In either case the public is 
served to its detriment rather than to its profit. 
The critic's paramount duty is, of course, his duty 
to the public, and every personal or private in- 
fluence whatsoever must be resisted by him from 
the moment that its presence is felt. 

All this is not easy, and yet it may be done 
bv a writer who has both knowledge and honesty. 
If a book has little or no value, the fact must be 
clearly and firmly stated, no matter what the au- 
thor under discussion may feel. This assign- 
ment to its place of a new book need not be done 
with the traditional brutality of the Quarterly 
reviewer, although even that would be better than 
the insipidity of the twaddle that so often passes 



Literature and Criticism 59 

for criticism, and that is obviously enough in- 
tended to win the good opinion of the author as 
well as so to hoodwink the public that its good 
opinion shall not be forfeited. How few critics 
there are who, recognizing the worthlessness of 
books, are yet ready, in Milton's phrase, to ' do 
sharpest justice on them as malefactors'? In 
fact, the sin of the Quarterly reviewers was not 
so much brutality as ignorance. Their attitude 
was hopelessly provincial, and they sought to 
conceal their limitations by the vigor of their in- 
vective. After all, a new book is bound to show 
an adequate reason for its being ; if no such rea- 
son exists, the fact cannot be too soon discerned 
and stated. A new book is an attempt to divert 
the attention of readers from those already in 
their possession ; it is an impertinence unless it 
bears a sufficient warrant. Books of knowledge 
must be multiplied with the advance of science, 
and their warrant is found in new facts and in 
the more perfect formulation of old ones. What 
Mr. Ruskin calls ' books of the hour ' are war- 
ranted by the special interests of the hour. c We 
ought to be entirely thankful for them, and en- 
tirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good 



60 Little Leaders 

use of them.' With books of these classes, the 
task of the critic is simple. He must seize upon 
their elements of novelty or of timeliness, and 
must determine whether or not they accomplish 
their purpose. 

With books that pretend to be additions to lit- 
erature proper — with poems, plays, and novels — 
his task is different. He must be alert to detect 
new notes of song or of passion, but if only fee- 
ble echoes reward the search he must make the 
fact perfectly clear. Of the books of belles-lettres 
published during a given year, it is certainly safe 
to say that nine out of ten should never have 
seen the light, that in at least this fraction of the 
total number there is neither wit, nor invention, 
nor grace of style, nor harmony of numbers, in 
any redeeming measure. And the critic who per- 
suades his readers that acquaintance with these 
empty books is more desirable than acquaintance 
with the recognized masterpieces — that it is de- 
sirable at all in view of the real literature waiting 
to be read — is careless of his responsibility and 
false to his trust. 

There is, after all, but one standard in litera- 
ture, and that is the highest. The great writers 



Literature and Criticism 61 

not only offer us boundless delight in themselves, 
but they provide us with a touchstone for the 
testing of all spurious metal. In a certain sense, 
it is the critic's business to make his readers inde- 
pendent of criticism, just as the physician's aim 
must be to make his patients independent of medi- 
cine. And the reader who has formed his taste 
upon good models does not need the critic's serv- 
ices except for occasional guidance. But the 
readers who need those services for instruction, 
in these days of insignificant or worthless books 
profusely multiplied, are still many j and the critic 
who sets up as absolute any merely relative stand- 
ard of excellence, who describes the work of tal- 
ent in terms only applicable to the work of genius, 
who praises the echo of noble literary work with- 
out clearly indicating its derivative character, who 
does not frequently renew his own strength by 
draughts from the fountainheads of literary in- 
spiration, — the work of this critic can be the 
source of no real helpfulness, and can only expect 
to share the speedy oblivion awaiting the books 
that it seems for a moment to magnify into com- 
ponent parts of permanent literature. 



62 Little Leaders 



TOUCHSTONES OF CRITICISM. 

We believe it was Emerson who once said that 
he was always glad to meet people who recog- 
nized the immeasurable superiority of Shake- 
speare over other poets. The feeling has doubt- 
less been cherished by many a reader besides; for, 
after all, what test of the sane outlook upon life, 
the deep sympathy with its manifold phases, the 
discriminative faculty that knows the ring of the 
precious metal from the base not in literature 
alone, could be equal to this ? To know the 
great poets, and to be sure that they are the great 
poets, not from mere passive acceptance of the 
traditional appraisement, but from reasoned and 
sincere conviction, — this is one of the most de- 
sirable of possessions ; for it betokens a well- 
ordered imagination, a just balance of the intel- 
lectual and emotional elements of the inner life, 
a capacity for the highest of all possible artistic 
satisfactions. A clever simulation of this attitude 
is sometimes encountered, but it cannot long de- 



Literature and Criticism j 63 

ceive the elect. It is sure to unmask itsellf in 
relations of anything like intimacy, to fall back 
upon pilfered formulas obviously hollow as' far 
as the one who flaunts them is concerned, to be 
caught napping when some peculiarly vital point 
is at issue, to betray by some trick of intonation, 
or gesture, or facial expression, the insincerity of 
the pretended appreciation. 

Yet even this pretence of comprehension; is 
not always to be condemned. If it be ma^de 
merely for the sake of conventionality, not much 
may be urged in its favor ; but if it result from 
the humility of a judgment confident that the 
estimates reinforced by successive generations 
must somehow be right, from the conviction that 
failure to perceive all the beauty that a clearer 
vision has discerned must be attributable to one's 
own spiritual defect, and from the determination 
to assume the proper initial attitude and patiently 
wait for enlightenment to come, then it is hardly 
chargeable with hypocrisy, and merits sympathy 
rather than disdain. In such a case, we aver, at 
least, the attitude in question is more becoming, 
to say nothing of its being more hopeful, than that 
of the out-and-out Philistine, who raises his stri- 



64 Little Leaders 

dent, battle-cry to some such effect as this — 1 1 
don't know anything about poetry, but I know 
what I like ' — and then proceeds to descant upon 
the beauties of some scribbler who does not de- 
serve serious consideration at all. This sort of 
outburst is familiar enough to everyone who un- 
wisely speaks of literature in the presence of peo- 
ple who get their intellectual sustenance from 
the sensational periodical of monthly or daily 
publication, or from the paper-covered fiction of 
the newstand, and politeness usually forbids the 
only sort of reply that is adequate to the occa- 
sion. The advice needed by a person of this 
type is, in Mr. Frederic Harrison's phrase, that 
1 he should fall on his knees and pray for a clean- 
lier and quieter spirit,' but it must be left un- 
spoken, and a smile of pity is the only permissible 
substitute. 

Undoubtedly the best general evidence that 
one is possessed of the cleanly and quiet spirit 
to which Mr. Harrison so feelingly alludes is 
afforded by a real pleasure in the accepted mas- 
terpieces of literary art, or at least in a consider- 
able number of them. The reader whose joy in 
Shakespeare and Dante, in Virgil and Tennyson, 



Literature and Criticism 65 

in Homer and Shelley, in Goethe and Cervantes, 
is genuine and perennial, is entitled to feel some 
confidence in his judgment of the moderns, as 
yet unclassified and unranked ; to him, literature 
is no trackless forest, but a familiar well-travelled 
highway, provided with sign-posts and landmarks. 
The great names of literature are touchstones 
which teach us unerringly to know the good from 
the meretricious, even among the slightest produc- 
tions of theiiour. For it is a mistake to assume 
that because the major poet is so immeasurably 
removed from the minor poet each must be judged 
by the standards of his own class. The hope- 
less confusion of perspective that results from 
this assumption is only too familiar to readers of 
current criticism. How often do we find some 
insignificant poetaster of the day characterized in 
terms that would give us pause were they applied 
to one of the master-singers of the world. How 
many c new poets ' have been noisily heralded 
during the last twenty years, only to be consigned 
to forgetfulness a few months later. These crit- 
ical extravagances are extremely unfortunate, for 
they bewilder the seeker after the beautiful, lead- 
ing him into many a will-o'-the-wisp-haunted 



66 Little Leaders 

morass, besides tending to bring all criticism into 
disrepute. They are probably responsible in large 
measure for the amazing opinion, to which recent 
years have given considerable currency, that crit- 
icism has no business to be anything more than 
a subjective record of the critic's impressions, an 
unreasoned enumeration of his likes and dislikes. 
But however prevalent such an opinion may 
become among the superficially-minded, genuine 
criticism, based upon the fundamental principles 
of art, is not likely to abdicate its function, any 
more than genuine economics is likely to abandon 
its scientific and rational procedure because of the 
subjective semi-emotional discussion that now in 
so many quarters usurps its name. And what- 
ever the special method that criticism may choose 
to pursue, it will never forget that literary art ex- 
ists, that its fundamentals have the sanction of 
the centuries, that any marked departure from 
those fundamentals is almost sure to be an indi- 
cation of decadence or degeneracy, and that ap- 
proved literature provides an almost infallible 
touchstone by which to test the value of the lit- 
erature yet on trial. The best criticism is that 
which we get from those writers whose knowl- 



Literature and Criticism 67 

edge of the great poets is widest, and whose sense 
of their excellence is most unfailing. To narrow 
this suggested method from the general to the 
particular, we may say that Matthew Arnold's 
plan of keeping within memory's reach a few 
carefully selected examples of faultless diction, for 
purposes of comparison, is hardly to be improved 
upon. Arnold was entirely right in saying that to 
recognize the ' grand style ' by this sort of touch- 
stone we do not need to be able to define it, and 
he might have added that no kind of a definition 
would help anyone to recognize it who, when 
brought into its presence, could remain uncon- 
scious thereof. What he says of the c grand style ' 
is equally applicable to the other types of style 
which literature embodies. Symonds suggested 
a similar test of lyric excellence when he said that 
'a genuine liking for "Prometheus Unbound" may 
be reckoned the touchstone of a man's capacity 
for understanding lyric poetry.' And as Arnold 
tells us that the reader who does not intuitively 
recognize the ' grand style ' in Milton's ' Stand- 
ing on earth, not rapt above the pole,' etc., can 
expect no other answer than c the Gospel words : 
Moriemini in peccatis vestris,' so Symonds tells us 



68 Little Leaders 

that c if a critic is so dull as to ask what " Light 
of Life ! thy lips enkindle " means, or to whom it 
is addressed, none can help him any more than 
one can help a man whose sense of hearing is too 
gross for the tenuity of a bat's cry.' 

Perhaps a word may be said, in closing, of an- 
other sort of touchstone, one having no objective 
value to speak of, yet subjectively of considerable 
interest to many of us. There are several pretty 
tales going about of life-long friendships formed 
and cemented by a common love for FitzGerald's 
c Omar.' Akin to these in their suggestion is the 
beautiful story of the Sicilians and their love for 
Euripides, the story which Browning has immor- 
talized in the first adventure of Balaustion. Al- 
most everyone who is widely read in literature 
takes to his heart of hearts some poet, as often 
as not of inferior rank, whose message is yet of 
such a nature as to make the strongest possible 
appeal to the individual idiosyncrasy. Such a 
poet becomes, to the one whose heart he has 
reached, a sort of touchstone to be applied to the 
rest of mankind, a test of the sympathies that 
must underlie real intimacy. But it should not 
be forgotten that this personal appeal to a few 



Literature and Criticism 69 

individuals here and there does not warrant them 
in reckoning their poet among the great singers 
of the world. We should not confuse the sub- 
jective standards of criticism with the objective 
ones, strong as is the temptation so to do. Even 
the sanest and most experienced critics do not 
always escape this confusion. Victor Hugo, for 
example, means a great deal to Mr. Swinburne 
personally, and so Mr. Swinburne, presumably 
writing what he intends for objective criticism, 
bestows deplorably extravagant praises upon the 
poet. On the other hand, Matthew Arnold, not 
liking some things about Shelley, is impelled to 
register the opinion that his prose is better than 
his poetry. It is hard to say which of these two 
vagaries is the more disheartening, If such men 
are capable of such lapses, what may we hope of 
lesser critics ? One thing, at least, is clear. It 
cannot be asserted too frequently or too insist- 
ently that the likes or the dislikes of a critic have 
nothing to do with criticism, if the term is to be 
taken intelligibly. The argument, c This work 
is good because I like it, and this other work is 
not good because I dislike it,' is nothing more 
than childish dogmatism, and quickly leads to 



70 Little Leaders 

some such reductio ad absurdum as has been illus- 
trated. In any objective sense, no merely per- 
sonal preference, however strongly felt, is to be 
reckoned among the touchstones of genuine crit- 
icism. 






Literature and Criticism 71 



ANONYMITY IN LITERARY 
CRITICISM. 

The question of responsibility for criticism is one 
of the most difficult with which the literary pro- 
fession has to deal. Should it be signed or un- 
signed, personal or impersonal ; should it express 
the opinion of an individual or of an organ ? The 
question has been ably and amply discussed from 
both points of view, and both systems (in English- 
speaking countries, at least) have been found to 
work well in practice. In behalf of the principle 
of anonymity it is argued, first, that criticism has 
increased weight when put forth with all the au- 
thority of a paper or review that has gained the 
confidence of the public ; second, that by this 
method alone is untrammelled criticism, free from 
personal obligations or reservations, to be secured. 
Upon these two leading arguments the case for 
anonymity rests ; others are occasionally brought 
forward, but examination shows them to be either 
of a derivative nature or of minor importance. 



72 Little Leaders 

In behalf of the criticism for which personal 
responsibility is assumed, we are told, first, that 
all such criticism really is the work of individuals, 
and that it is unworthy to pretend that it is any- 
thing else ; second, that intentional unfairness is 
less likely to be displayed when authorship is 
avowed than when it is concealed ; third, that 
injustice is done to the critic himself when the 
periodical to which he contributes assumes all the 
credit for his work, and that this assumption re- 
acts upon the work, tending to make it colorless 
and weak. 

It is hardly necessary for us to say, in so many 
words, that the arguments for personal responsi- 
bility seem to us the weightier, since we have, 
from the start, adhered to the practice of publish- 
ing signed criticisms of all the important works 
reviewed in ' The Dial/ While granting that 
the impersonal system has some advantages, it 
seems to admit of still more abuses. The nature 
of these abuses has been succinctly set forth by 
Mr. Besant in a recent article. He says : 

' I should rejoice to see the custom of signing criti- 
cisms in literature and art become general, for several 
reasons. First, because it would instantly, I believe, de- 



1 



Literature and Criticism 73 

molish the flippant smartness and insolence with which 
some papers allow their columns to be disfigured — smart- 
ness which disguises the fact that the critic knows nothing 
of his subject j it would force the writer at least to read 
the book j it would put an end to the reviewing of books 
in the batch j it would make the young critic anxious to 
advance his own name as a writer who can deliver care- 
fully considered judgment in the courteous language of 
a gentleman ; this language he would study to preserve 
in his work, or to learn if he had never learned it ; and 
it would enormously raise the position and status of a 
critic in the eyes of the editor, as well as those of the read- 
ing public. That it would also rapidly advance the 
capable critic in his own profession may be taken for 
granted.' 

For these reasons, and for others of a similar 
character, we think it desirable that the author- 
ship of literary criticism should, as a rule, be 
acknowledged. 

There is, however, one abuse connected with 
the system of signed reviews that requires a mo- 
ment's consideration. When this system is in 
use, the temptation is strong to secure the names 
of well-known writers, regardless of their fitness 
for the work. We have far too much of this 
misdirected effort, both in the sensational press of 
the day and of the month. Some periodicals of 



74 Little Leaders 

the sort in question even display title-pages or 
tables of contents in which the names of their 
contributors appear in heavy-faced type, while the 
subjects of the contributions are printed in the 
most modest and inconspicuous of characters. In 
fact, one of the greatest vices of our periodical 
press is this willingness to appeal to the public 
ear by means of names rather than by means of 
serious and competent discussion. When the sub- 
ject considered is subordinated to the personality 
of the man who writes about it, we have reached 
something very like a reductio ad absurdum of the 
system. At all events, we have shown how a 
system, excellent in principle, may be condemned 
by its own excesses. On the other hand, the 
anonymous system too easily lends itself to con- 
cealment of the poverty of the resources at the 
command of a review. When criticism is to 
be unsigned, there is an increased difficulty in ob- 
taining criticism of the best quality, and editors 
will sometimes succumb to the temptation af- 
forded by the fact that, however inefficient the 
work offered them may be, it must share in the 
general prestige of the periodical in which it ap- 
pears. As regards the two abuses just considered, 






Literature and Criticism 75 

the one appears to be no more probable or dan- 
gerous than the other ; in either case, the abuse 
in question will not be chargeable to any editor 
who accepts the responsibility of his position. In 
other words, the editor who is determined to pre- 
sent his readers with serious and honest criticism 
will refuse to publish incompetent work, whether 
it come baited with a well-known name or bear 
no name at all. 

When we consider the influence upon the 
writer himself (assuming him to be competent) 
of the knowledge that his work is to be signed 
or unsigned, it seems to us that the argument for 
personally acknowledged criticism is much the 
better. It is so easy for the anonymous critic to 
be unfair, to allow his work to be colored by a 
personal prejudice against which it is impossible 
for the reader to be on his guard. The best of 
the anonymous reviews show occasional exam- 
ples of very uncritical prejudice, which, as a rule 
obvious enough to the expert in such matters, is 
entirely unperceived by the average reader. 
Sometimes, indeed, the prejudice is so deftly con- 
cealed as to impose upon the very elect. That 
this evil is greatly lessened when criticism is ac- 



76 Little Leaders 

knowledged should be apparent enough. There 
are cases, no doubt, in which the reviewer who 
is to sign his criticism will fail, for personal rea- 
sons, to speak out his whole mind, and an occa- 
sional work may, in consequence, receive a more 
generous measure of praise than it deserves. But 
this evil appears to us of minor importance when 
compared with the evil of prejudice protected by 
anonymity, and unrestrained by any sense of per- 
sonal responsibility. Without going as far as 
Schopenhauer, when he calls anonymity the 
c shield of all literary rascality,' we may find a 
certain satisfaction in his vigorous denunciation 
of the system. 

* It was introduced under the pretext of protecting the 
honest critic, who warned the public against the resent- 
ment of the author and his friends. But where there is 
one case of this sort there will be a hundred where it 
merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who 
cannot stand by what he has said, or possibly to conceal 
the shame of one who has been cowardly and base enough 
to recommend a book to the public for the purpose of put- 
ting money into his own pocket. Often enough it is only 
a cloak for covering the obscurity, incompetence, and 
insignificance of the critic. It is incredible what impu- 
dence these fellows will show, and what literary trickery 
they will venture to commit, as soon as they know they 
are safe under the shadow of anonymity. ' 



Literature and Criticism 77 

There is much force in this, and there is pith in 
the author's further suggestion that a man should 
be answerable for what he writes, c at any rate 
with his honor, if he has any ; and if he has 
none, let his name neutralize the effect of his 
words.' 

Thus we see that one of the two leading argu- 
ments for anonymity does not seem, upon care- 
ful examination, to be well based. The other 
argument — that criticism bearing the authority 
of a review has greater weight than that which 
bears but the authority of an individual — might 
be dismissed with the question : Why should 
criticism have any greater weight than attaches 
to the authority of its writer ? But there is really 
more than this to be said upon the subject. A 
critical periodical should be more than a mere 
collection of essays. It is a pitiful theory that 
regards a review as a mere dumping-ground for 
all sorts of opinions. A review should stand for 
something ; it should represent sane intelligence 
upon the subjects with which it is concerned ; it 
should march in the vanguard of thought. M. 
Zola, who has recently, in his address before the 
London Conference of Journalists, stirred up the 



78 Little Leaders 

question of anonymity, goes astray at this point. 
His plea is for personal responsibility in criticism, 
and is excellently urged, but he attempts to make 
an unreal distinction between political and liter- 
ary criticism. He expresses the opinion that 
political discussion should be impersonal, and 
adds : 

* At the same time I confess that if I recognize the 
necessity for anonymity in political matters, I am none 
the less surprised that it can exist in literary matters. 
Here I entirely fail to grasp the situation. I refer espe- 
cially to articles of criticism, judgments pronounced upon 
the play, the book, the work of art. Can there be such 
a thing as the literature, the art of a party ? That disci- 
pline, average opinion, should prevail in politics is cer- 
tainly wise. But that a literary or artistic production 
should be adapted to suit the views of a whole party, that 
a scythe should be used to cut down everybody to the 
same level, that all should be mixed up in a common herd, 
in order to politely please your public, this I consider to be 
dangerous to the intellectual vitality of a nation. This 
sort of regimental criticism, speaking in the name of a 
majority, can only end in producing a mediocre, color- 
less literature.' 

The mistake here is in the assumption that im- 
personal discussion, whether political or artistic, 
must be partisan. But it cannot for a moment 



Literature and Criticism 79 

be admitted that either the one or the other is 
necessarily partisan, except in the sense that it 
must take the part of knowledge against ignorance, 
of intelligence against dulness, of sanity against 
eccentricity, of rationality against irrationality. 
We do not decide against anonymous literary crit- 
icism because of its assumed tendency to become 
partisan, or to express average opinion — it cannot 
well be the one, and ought not to do the other — 
but for the far more cogent reasons above set forth 
and also recognized by M. Zola elsewhere in his 
address. It must be remembered that a critical 
review has to deal with all sorts of subjects, not 
only with belles lettres^ but with history and sci- 
ence and philosophy as well. The word parti- 
sanship has no meaning when applied to so wide 
a range of interests. 

Recurring once more to the main argument for 
anonymity, we would say, finally, that the criti- 
cism which is published in a review of high char- 
acter and recognized authority does receive added 
weight from that very fact, if signed no less than 
if unsigned. We do not believe that the addition 
of a signature detracts from the authority of the 
criticism, and we are sure that it adds to the 



80 Little Leaders 

reader's confidence in the sincerity of the writer. 
If the name of the writer is well known, his opin- 
ion comes with the added authority of the review 
in which it appears ; if the name is not well known, 
the importance to be attached to the opinion will 
be measured, not by the obscurity of the writer, 
but by the confidence which the editorial conduct 
of the review inspires. In a word, when critical 
articles are signed, there is at least no loss of 
weight, and there may be a distinct increment of 
gain. The last editions of the c Encyclopaedia 
Britannica ' and of ' Chambers's Encyclopaedia ' 
are the better and the more authoritative from 
the fact that their chief contributions are acknowl- 
edged. ' The Fortnightly Review,' with its 
signed articles, quickly gained a higher prestige 
than had been enjoyed by the anonymous quar- 
terlies. If c The Athenaeum ' and ' The Satur- 
day Review' and 'The Nation,' following the 
example of 'The Academy ' and 'The Dial,' were 
to adopt the system of signed criticisms, they 
would probably exert a deeper influence than they 
do at present, and would certainly command a 
more unreserved confidence from their constitu- 
ency. 



Literature and Criticism 81 



POETRY AS CRITICISM OF 
LITERATURE. 

We have heard much (something too much in- 
deed) of poetry as a criticism of life, since the 
time when Matthew Arnold, in his essay on 
Wordsworth, started that famous phrase on its 
career. Its inadequacy has been pointed out by 
many critics since, and it is now, we should say, 
definitely relegated to the limbo of half-truths 
that fascinate for a time by virtue of their novelty, 
but that speedily become discredited. Probably 
the most convincing of the many protests it 
evoked was that of the writer who urged that, so 
far from being a mere criticism upon life, the 
greatest poetry is life itself, in direct transcription. 
But, while we must regard as whimsical the no- 
tion that poetry is nothing more than criticism, 
even glorified criticism, we may freely admit that 
there is to be found in poetical literature a large 
element critical of life and of many other things 
as well. Among those other things, literature 



82 Little Leaders 

itself is of considerable importance ; and we here 
wish to say a few words about the treasures of 
literary criticism that are among the precious gifts 
brought us by the poet. 

In this age of the multiplication of anthologies, 
it has for many years been to us a matter of 
surprise that someone did not prepare a volume 
of • Poems of Poets,* to go with the ' Poems of 
Places/ the c Poems of Books,' the c Poems of 
Nature,' and the many other special collections. 
Within the last year or so, the want has been 
supplied, after a fashion, by two independent col- 
lections ; and the lover of poets, as well as the 
owner of dogs and the smoker of tobacco, is now 
provided with his own anthology of favorite 
pieces. There is still room for a better collec- 
tion than has yet been made, but the needs of a 
deserving class of readers have at least received 
recognition. 

It has often been urged that the critic of any 
art should be at the same time an adept in the 
practice thereof. This view doubtless rests upon 
a misconception, being analogous to the view 
that no one can intelligently read a foreign lan- 
guage without speaking it as well. In the case 



Literature and Criticism 83 

of the language, as is sufficiently obvious, the 
process by which one acquires its use for reading 
is essentially unlike the process by which one 
learns to speak it. To speak psychologically, 
the nexus of associative tracks worn by much 
reading of French or Latin is one thing, and the 
nexus worn by much speaking of a foreign tongue 
quite another. To be more exact, we should 
perhaps say that the associative stimulus, while 
going over the same nerve-track in any particu- 
lar case, takes one direction in the case of read- 
ing, and the reverse direction in the case of 
speech. Because the passage from word-symbol 
to concept is easily made, it by no means follows 
that the passage from concept to word-symbol 
will present no difficulty. A similar situation, 
although a far more complicated one, is presented 
when we compare the practice of literary com- 
position with its criticism. But it is nevertheless 
true that the reader of a foreign tongue is better 
prepared to get its full significance if his associa- 
tions have been trained to work freely in both 
directions ; and it is likewise true that the critic 
of literature who has made literature himself is, 
ipso fafto, in some respects better equipped to 



84 Little Leaders 

understand just what has been accomplished by 
his fellow workers. Only we must not go so 
far as to say that creative power brings with it 
the critical faculty ; the former may indeed add 
something to the effectiveness of the latter, but 
the intuitional character of the one is still per- 
manently differentiated from the reflective char- 
acter of the other. 

That the poets are capable of writing good 
prose criticism of their art, it needs no argument to 
show. We think at once of Lessing and Goethe, 
of Voltaire and Hugo, of Shelley and Coleridge, 
and of fifty others. We are now concerned to 
call attention to the fact that some of the most 
acute and sympathetic criticism of the poets that 
we have is to be found in poetry itself. Since 
English literature best illustrates this fact, although 
other literatures might profitably be adduced in 
further support of it, we shall be content with En- 
glish examples alone. The good work of poet- 
ical criticism was begun by Chaucer, who labored 
under the disadvantage of having no fellow-poets 
of his own speech to sing about, and who was 
thus compelled to find subjects for his ' House of 
Fame ' and other critical ventures in the great 



Literature and Criticism 85 

names of classical antiquity or of contemporary 
Italy. From Chaucer's time to the present, the 
work has gone merrily on, and the last of our 
great poets has written more good poetry about 
his fellow-singers than we owe to any of his pre- 
decessors. 

The contemporaries and immediate followers 
of Chaucer had at least one English poet to pan- 
egyrize ; and so Gower, and Occleve, and Lyd- 
gate, to the best of their mean powers, paid trib- 
ute to their master. Even to-day, do we not feel 
some thrill of sympathy when we read Occleve ? 
« O maister dere and fader reverent, 
My maister Chaucer, flowre of eloquence, 
Mirrour of fructuous entendement 
O universal fader in science, 
Alias ! that thou thyne excellent prudence 
In thy bedde mortel myghtest not bequethe 
What eyled dethe, alias ! why wolde he sle thee ? * 

When we come down to the Elizabethans, we 
find the poets rioting in versified criticism of one 
another. Shakespeare is a notable exception to 
this rule, and in the one case in which he dis- 
played enthusiasm for a contemporary, and spoke 
of ' the proud full sail of his great verse,' he for- 
got to tell us whom he meant. There is a good 



86 Little Leaders 

deal of log-rolling, and no little malice, in all this 
personal poetry (such things have been known in 
later times, even in our own), but many of these 
tributes strike a note of sincerity, and display an 
insight for which we must ever cherish them. 
How true, for example, is Drayton's familiar de- 
scription of Marlowe : ' His raptures were all air 
and fire '; and Barnfield's of Spenser : c Whose 
deep conceit is such, as passing all conceit, needs 
no defense '; and Jonson's of Shakespeare : c He 
was not for an age but for all time.' 

It is curious to note, as we work down the 
centuries, how the taste of each age is reflected in 
these appreciations of poets by poets. In the sev- 
enteenth century, Milton and Dryden, indeed, as 
we might naturally expect of the two greatest men 
of their age, showed an understanding of Shake- 
speare's supremacy that leaves nothing to be de- 
sired ; but the lesser men of the time clearly pre- 
ferred the lesser Elizabethans, or the decadent 
artificers among their own contemporaries. The 
poets of our so-called Augustan age usually re- 
ferred to the great English classics in a perfunc- 
tory sort of way, and gave them but a grudging 
recognition. It is very amusing to find Addi- 



Literature and Criticism 87 

son, with all the airs of the Superior Person, 
saying of Chaucer that c In vain he jests in his 
unpolished strain/ and of Spenser, that he c In 
ancient tales amused a barbarous age,' writing on 
the other hand of ' Great Cowley then, a mighty 
genius,' and going into rhapsodies over that c har- 
monious bard,' the < courtly Waller.' Equally 
amusing contrasted citations might be made from 
Pope. It was only in the later eighteenth cen- 
tury, with Collins and Gray, that poetry acquired 
a saner outlook upon itself, and began to grope 
back toward the old truth that art is better than 
artifice. 

The nineteenth century is so rich in the hom- 
age of poet to fellow-poet, that an essay, rather 
than a paragraph, would be needed to do it jus- 
tice. Wordsworth's sonnet to Milton, Shelley's 
'Adonais,' Keats's 'Chapman's Homer,' Landor's 
sonnet c To Robert Browning,' Mrs. Browning's 
4 Wine of Cyprus,' Rossetti's c Dante at Verona,' 
Arnold's c Thyrsis,' Tennyson's c Alcaics,' and 
Mr. Swinburne's sonnets on the Elizabethan 
dramatists, are a few of the countless examples 
that will occur to every reader. And we would 
call particular attention to the fine critical quality 



88 Little Leaders 

of the mass of work which these poems so imper- 
fectly represent. Their writers have good rea- 
sons for the faith that is in them ; they do not 
merely eulogize, they illuminate as well. If this 
were not so, the present article would have no 
excuse for existence. We do not know where 
in prose to find better criticism than Words- 
worth's of Milton : 

' Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea j 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 1 

or Landor's of Browning : 

' Since Chaucer was alive and hale 
No man has walk'd along our roads with step 
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse,' 

or Arnold's of Goethe : 

' He took the suffering human race, 
He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
And struck his finger on the place, 
And said : " Thou ailest here, and here! " * 

or Mr. Swinburne's of Dante mourning over a 
country recreant to its mission and dead in spirit : 

' The steepness of strange stairs had tired his feet, 
And his lips yet seemed sick of that salt bread 
Wherewith the lips of banishment are fed ; 



Literature and Criticism 89 

But nothing was there in the world so sweet 
As the most bitter love, like God's own grace, 
Wherewith he gazed on that fair buried face.* 

We hope that someone will undertake the 
preparation of an enchiridion of poetical criticism 
more comprehensive than has yet been attempted, 
a collection of the best things that have been 
said in the poetry of half a dozen modern litera- 
tures about the best poets of the whole world. 
Such a collection would be of the greatest value 
to the student of literary criticism, and would 
deserve to stand on the shelf beside the ' Poetics ' 
of Aristotle, the treatise of Longinus, the impas- 
sioned pleas of Sidney and Shelley, and the essays 
of Coleridge, Arnold, and Pater. 



90 Little Leaders 



THE NEGLECTED ART OF 
TRANSLATION. 

These closing years of the nineteenth century 
have made us more cosmopolitan, in many re- 
spects, than we ever were before. The world 
has shrunk for us in several waysj as a mere 
matter of geography, the greater part of it is 
within easy reach ; politically and socially, the 
sense of human solidarity is growing all the time ; 
and in intellectual affairs it is safe to say that no 
voice having a real message to deliver is likely to 
wait long for appreciative listeners. Neglected 
genius seems to have become a thing of the past, 
and we now suffer instead from a tendency to 
exalt with undue precipitancy to the ranks of 
genius every questionable and imperfectly real- 
ized talent that appears upon the intellectual hor- 
izon. In literature particularly, we are alert as 
never before to catch the new note, to seize upon 
and exploit the new thing. Let a poet, or nov- 
elist, or essayist but raise his head in any corner 






Literature and Criticism 91 

of civilization, and, if his message be not purely 
provincial in its application, he will soon find him- 
self translated into the tongues of the aliens, and 
his thoughts will find lodgment upon their lips. 
Nay, if the message be but a provincial one after 
all, it is not unlikely to incur the same fate, such 
has become our curiosity concerning all our fel- 
low-men, such our insatiable demand for the new 
type and the local coloring. 

This linking together of the literatures by trans- 
lation is particularly noticeable among the peo- 
ples using the German, English, and French lan- 
guages, and, as an intellectual tendency, has fol- 
lowed the order just named. Germany was the 
leader in the movement, and throughout most of 
the century, has been seizing with omnivorous 
appetite upon whatever was most notable in the 
literary product of other countries. Not only has 
she assimilated the productions of such peoples 
as the Hungarians, the Scandinavians, and the 
Slavs — peoples closely associated with her either 
politically or ethnically — but also those of the 
English and French, the Italian and Spanish. 
The works of Jokai, CEhlenschlager, and Push- 
kin first found a large foreign audience among 



92 Little Leaders 

the Teutons ; Dante, Calderon, and Voltaire 
early became theirs by right of conquest, and the 
Shakespearian permeation of German literature 
is so familiar a fact as hardly to need mention. 
The English people, on either side of the At- 
lantic, have followed the Germans, although at a 
distance, in thus welcoming the foreigner to their 
hearth, and we all know the good work of Car- 
lyle and Coleridge, in the English case, and of 
the Concord group of plain livers and high think- 
ers, in our own. France, maintaining longer than 
Germany or England her self-sufficient attitude, 
has more recently fallen into line, and the most 
desperate efforts of chauvinism have failed to pro- 
tect her frontiers from the invasion of the alien 
writer. Indeed, the proposition that new converts 
are the most zealous of all, is well illustrated by 
the eager enthusiasm with which the Frenchman 
is nowadays taking up the foreigner and his works. 
The distinction is very marked, for example, be- 
tween the polite curiosity with which Ampere 
explored Scandinavian literature for the informa- 
tion of Frenchmen half a century ago, and the 
genuine interest which is taken by Frenchmen of 
to-day in the works of the great Norwegians. 



I M 



Literature and Criticism 93 

In our own country, while cordial recognition 
of the established names of foreign literature has 
not been lacking since mid-century, we have, 
until very recently, been slow to seize upon the 
work of new writers. TourgueniefF, for exam- 
ple, had long been naturalized in France and Ger- 
many before he was discovered by America. Dr. 
Ibsen had done the greatest and most enduring 
part of his work twenty years ago, but the voice 
of the student here and there among us who had 
discovered him was that of one crying in the 
wilderness. A few contemporary Germans and 
Frenchmen, somewhat capriciously selected, were 
known to our readers ; others, equally important, 
were not known at all. As for the contemporary 
Italian, or Spaniard, or Pole, or Russian, his name 
was, with hardly an exception, meaningless to us. 
Most of us who studied the history of foreign 
literatures were content to stop with the dawn of 
the century ; of active modern tendencies in the 
world of foreign letters we had not the least no- 
tion. 

The rapidity with which, of late, nous avons 
change tout cela, is a little surprising. The past 
few years have brought before our eyes, in be- 



94 Little Leaders 

wildering succession, an array of contemporary 
writers from all parts of the civilized world. Nov- 
elists and dramatists, essayists and poets, of the 
most diverse nationalities and ideals, compete for 
our attention. Not only do the new works of 
the older literatures crowd upon us, but the new 
literatures of Canada, Australia, Greece, Portu- 
gal, and Spanish America as well. Now most of 
these new claimants for attention require conver- 
sion into our vernacular before we may become 
acquainted with them. And this fact leads us to 
the real consideration of the present article, which 
is, briefly, that the art of translation, so far from 
keeping pace with its practice, lags painfully be- 
hind. The more translations we get, the worse 
they seem to be. Time was when a translation 
was at least apt to be a labor of love, conscien- 
tiously and sympathetically performed. At pres- 
ent, it seems a sort of scramble to be first in the 
field. A novel by a popular foreign author is 
almost sure to get before our public in a transla- 
tion so wooden, so unidiomatic, so essentiallv 
ignorant, as to be a mere travesty of the original. 
One who has occasion to examine many of these 
productions is only too often reminded of the sort 



Literature and Criticism 95 

of translation that was suffered by Bottom, and 
is surprised beyond measure when he comes upon 
a version which is not an utter perversion. We 
do not here speak of the ethical question, so often 
ignored by those who deliberately alter or curtail 
the text of their originals, but merely of the lack 
of intelligence and capacity nearly always dis- 
played by translators of contemporary literature. 
The simple fact is that the qualifications of a 
translator are set far too low, both by his em- 
ployer and the public. The long-suffering pub- 
lic, of course, has to take what it can get, is too 
apathetic to demand better workmanship, and 
easily grows accustomed to the hack-work that 
dulls the taste and deadens the literary sensibility. 
As for the employer, the publisher, he finds a 
ready sale for the cheap product, and hence does 
not offer the compensation that good work ought 
to bring. Of course he has a moral responsibility 
in the matter, but he is not likely to care for that 
when his pocket is concerned. Any young per- 
son with a smattering of French or German and 
a dictionary to help him out, feels competent to 
become a translator, it never occurring to him 
that the cultivation of an English style is the first 



96 Little Leaders 

requisite of all; while the average publisher shows 
that he accepts this view by refusing to pay for 
translations any sum that a competent workman, 
the real master of two languages, can possibly 
accept. Of course, honorable exceptions to this 
rule may be found here and there, and equally of 
course good translations will now and then come 
from persons actuated, not by self-interest, but 
by a delight in good workmanship for its own 
sake. But the conditions that fix the existing 
standard of translation are still mainly of the hard 
commercial kind, and, until they are in some way 
modified, the standard will remain low. 

It is possible that the art of translation may 
rise from its present disrepute, but the process 
will be slow. Cause for hopefulness may be 
found in two facts. The first of these facts is 
that the Copyright Act of 189 1 for the first time 
gave the foreign writer some measure of control 
over the American publication of translations of 
his work. He has it in his power to secure an 
adequate translation, and to preempt the market 
for it. Unfortunately, he does not always know 
a good translation from a bad one, and even if he 
does, may find it difficult to arrange for what he 



Literature and Criticism 97 

wants. Possibly he may come to learn by ex- 
perience how immeasurably his reputation suffers 
from blundering translations, and take measures 
to secure himself against them. The other cause 
for hopefulness is in the fact that an immense 
expansion has taken place of late years in the 
modern language departments of our educational 
institutions. The languages of Europe are pur- 
sued in the scientific and literary spirit by an in- 
creasing number of students every year. These 
students will make most of the translations that 
will be read by the coming decades. It is not 
too much to believe that their better methods 
and fuller knowledge will make itself felt more 
and more as the years pass, and that their efforts 
may cause a marked elevation in the current 
standard of literary translation. 



EDUCATION 



THE HIGHER AIM. 

Oh beati que' pochi che seggono a quella mensa ove il 
pane degli Angeli si mangia. — Convito, I. , I. 

Pan degli Angeli, del quale 
Vivese qui, ma non sen vien satollo. 

— ParadisOy II. , u t 12. 

We build and build ; each generation's rise 
Brings us the old new question : what the way 
To shape the soul, and fit it for the fray 

That is the life of man. Shall these suffice — 

The rule of thumb, the formula concise, 
The pedant's wisdom hoarded day by day ? 
Dry husks of fact — do these the toil repay ? 

Shall this of all our labor be the price ? 

Nay, truth our aim, and truth is more than fact ; 
Ere knowledge ripen into worthy act 

The spirit's glow must make it truth indeed, 
Of ardent aspiration all compact, 

Such truth as Dante won in sorest need, 
4 Angelic bread ' whereon the soul mav feed. 



A FEW WORDS ABOUT 
EDUCATION. 

At no previous time in the history of this coun- 
try has the discussion of educational questions 
been so serious a preoccupation as it is at present. 
During the past quarter of a century we have 
become pretty thoroughly awakened, not so much 
to the importance of education, which has never 
been questioned, as to the importance of estab- 
lishing education upon the right foundation, and 
of conducting it in accordance with the most en- 
lightened methods. So great a fermentation in so 
important a department of thought is, of course, 
a desirable thing, even if its blessings be not 
wholly unmixed. It is well occasionally to shake 
off our torpor, to get out of ruts, to avoid stag- 
nation at almost any cost. But such a condition 
of intellectual unrest, such a determination to 
reexamine the old grounds of the faith, is always 
fraught with the danger that we may, in our haste 
to make all things new, sweep away the good 



102 Little Leaders 

with the bad, and discard some of the funda- 
mental principles of the philosophy of a sound 
education. 

Many zealous advocates of what they are 
pleased to call ' the new education * are so thor- 
oughgoing in their notions that the temperate on- 
looker is compelled to view their proposed policy 
somewhat askance. They would have us believe 
that the world has hitherto been all astray, that 
the educational wisdom of the ages is little better 
than foolishness, that we are upon the eve of a 
reform in our practice which is to be nothing less 
than revolutionary in its effect. These theorists 
complain, briefly, that education has in the past 
been made too much a matter of words; the 
remedy they offer is to make it in the future chiefly 
a matter of things. To bring about this radical 
change it is proposed to displace to a great ex- 
tent the sterile practices of literary, philological, 
and historical study by the productive practices 
with which physical science acquaints us, to sub- 
stitute for the study of man in his social and po- 
litical character the study of man in his charac- 
ter as a tool-making and tool-using animal, mainly 
intent upon material comfort and progress. The 



Education 103 

educational tendency here suggested is very 
marked at the present day, and the signs of the 
times in many ways force it upon our attention. 
It is a tendency more marked, perhaps, during 
recent years, than ever before, and more marked, 
probably, in our own country than in any other. 
This is a fact easily to be accounted for. The 
development of physical science is the dominant 
intellectual characteristic of the age, and this de- 
velopment, with its countless implied possibilities 
of material amelioration, has diverted many eyes 
from those things of the spirit that are so essential 
to the higher welfare of mankind, fixing them 
instead upon the objects which their lower na- 
tures demand ; it has, in a word, substituted ideals 
of comfort for ideals of virtue and of the full- 
statured life of the soul. And this diversion of 
attention from the higher to the lower aims of 
life, this substitution of lesser ideals for greater, 
of ignoble for noble purposes, has been nowhere 
else so nearly complete as in this country of 
unexampled material resources and unexampled 
material prosperity. 

Matthew Arnold, in one of his essays on relig- 
ious subjects, has a passage exactly descriptive of 



104 Little Leaders 

our too prevalent attitude toward the educational 
problem. This passage, with the necessary sub- 
stitution of c the humanities,' or some such phrase, 
for the word c religion,' runs as follows : 

' Undoubtedly there are times when a reaction sets in, 
when an interest in the processes of productive industry, 
in physical science and the practical arts, is called an in- 
terest in things, and an interest in [the humanities] is 
called an interest in words. People really do seem to im- 
agine that in seeing and learning how buttons are made, or 
papier mdch'e, they shall find some new and untried vital 
resource ; that our prospects from this sort of study have 
something peculiarly hopeful and animating about them j 
and that the positive and practical thing to do is to give 
up [the humanities] and turn to them.' 

Now a great many sincere and well-meaning peo- 
ple have been telling us of late that ' the positive 
and practical thing to do ' in education is to set 
aside such useless studies as ' mere ' history and 
literature, as c dead ' languages and ancient civ- 
ilizations ; to restrict considerably the attention 
paid to most other kinds of ' book ' learning ; and 
to devote the time thus reclaimed from waste to 
such scientific and even manual pursuits as are 
likely to have some direct bearing upon the every- 
day life of the men and women that our school- 
children are so soon to become. 



Education 105 

Half-truths are often more dangerous than 
downright errors, and the consequences of the 
sciolist theory of education just outlined are in 
many directions manifest. For one thing, there 
is the loud outcry, heard in many quarters, for 
the introduction of 'manual training' into our 
common-school systems, not as an adjunct to 
intellectual training, which it may very properly 
become, but as a substitute for what is contempt- 
uously styled the Wortkram of the old-fashioned 
systems. One persistent advocate of this partic- 
ular nostrum goes so far as to say that in the ideal 
school of his imagining c the highest text-books 
are tools, and how to -use them most intelli- 
gently is the highest test of scholarship.' In the 
field of higher education, the same spirit is illus- 
trated by the immense expansion of the techno- 
logical and scientific departments of our universi- 
ties, at the expense, too often, of the humanities, 
and by the determined warfare that has been 
waged, during the past score of years, upon the 
classical and other branches of the older education. 
Almost everywhere, too, the newspaper press has 
joined in the clamorous demand for a more 'prac- 
tical' education; that is, for an education by 



106 Little Leaders 

whose aid the body may be fattened, however the 
soul be starved. 

In the development of the current popular 
opinion upon this all-important subject, we may 
distinguish two phases. To begin with, science, 
in the first flush of its great mid-century achieve- 
ments, put forth the arrogant plea that it alone 
was deserving of serious consideration as an edu- 
cational discipline. Mr. Spencer's famous trac- 
tate upon c Education ' seemed to give cogency 
to this plea, and for a time did duty as a sort of 
gospel of the new dispensation. But the narrow- 
ness and inadequacy of that gospel became, after 
a while, apparent even to the less reflective of 
minds, and a new doctrine emerged to fit the 
altered educational attitude. That doctrine, which 
has lately been urged with considerable eloquence, 
is, substantially, that all subjects are equally valu- 
able as intellectual disciplines, and that physics and 
biology, if pursued in the proper spirit, are as po- 
tent to build up the full-statured life as are history, 
and literature, and philosophy. But there are now 
indications that a third phase of the discussion is 
at hand, and that the question of relative educa- 
tional values is about to receive a more searching 



Education 107 

examination than it has ever had before. And, 
in this connection, it is indeed significant that the 
President for 1895 of the National Educational 
Association, in preparing his inaugural address, 
should have felt that the time was ripe to use 
such words as the following : 

« If it be true that Spirit and Reason rule the universe, 
then the highest and most enduring knowledge is of the 
things of the Spirit. That subtle sense of the beautiful 
and the sublime which accompanies spiritual insight, and 
is part of it, is the highest achievement of which human- 
ity is capable. . . . The study of nature is entitled to 
recognition on grounds similar to those put forward for 
the study of literature, of art, and of history. But among 
themselves these divisions of knowledge fall into an order 
of excellence as educational material that is determined 
by their respective relations to the development of the 
reflective Reason. The application of this test must inev- 
itably lead us, while honoring science and insisting upon 
its study, to place above it the study of history, of liter- 
ature, of art, and of institutional life. * 

Contrasted with such an ideal as this of the 
well-ordered education, how poor are all ideals 
that but proclaim the watchword of a narrow 
practicality. One of the finest expressions ever 
given to the nobler view is embodied in this pas- 
sage from Newman's c Idea of a University ': 



108 Little Leaders 

« That perfection of the Intellect, which is the result 
of Education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted to indi- 
viduals in their respective measures, is the clear, calm, 
accurate vision and comprehension of all things as far as 
the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and 
with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic 
from its knowledge of history ; it is almost heart-searching 
from its knowledge of human nature ; it has almost su- 
pernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and 
prejudice ; it has almost the repose of faith, because noth- 
ing can startle it ; it has almost the beauty and harmony 
of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eter- 
nal order of things and the music of the spheres.' 

Nor does this higher aim concern the advanced 
stages of educational work alone. It should be 
an inspiring force in the kindergarten no less than 
in the college, for the child, as well as the man, 
does not live by bread alone, unless, indeed, it be 
that ' pan degli Angeli ' whereof Dante tells us. 
c Those few,' he says, ' are blessed who sit at the 
board ' where it is eaten. Let it be our task to 
make the few the many, and the largess such as 
knows no stint. 



Education 109 



THE APPROACH TO LITERATURE. 

An excellent educational method, much in vogue 
among the more progressive of modern teachers, 
is based upon the principle of proceeding from the 
near and the familiar to the strange and the remote. 
It is a method that may be pushed to extremes, 
but it is fundamentally sound. In geography, for 
example, a child starts with the schoolhouse, the 
village, and the surrounding country made famil- 
iar by his wanderings, and afterwards extends to 
scenes unvisited the construction thus begun. In 
history, the happenings of the day, as narrated in 
the newspapers and talked about by his acquaint- 
ances, provide the starting-point. In seeking to 
arrive at a comprehension of the nature and work- 
ings of government and the organization of soci- 
ety, his attention is first directed toward the town- 
meeting, which he has possibly seen at work; 
toward the policeman or the constable, whom he 
has learned to recognize as the embodiment of 
executive authority before having learned the 



no Little Leaders 

meaning of that term; or toward the tax-collector, 
about whose visits certain ominous associations 
have clustered, before the function of that persona 
non grata has been realized. 

Is there not in the method thus illustrated a 
suggestion worth putting to the uses of literature ? 
May not the young be led to a true perception of 
literary values by just this process of smoothing 
the ways that lead to a correct taste, this device 
of fitting the conscious achievement to the earlier 
unconscious one ? Those having occasion to ob- 
serve young people who are going through the 
educational mill know that literary taste and a 
genuine delight in 4 the authors ' are not com- 
mon, that they are the exception rather than the 
rule. Yet most children have, in the earlier stages 
of their school life, some germ of literary appre- 
ciation that needs nothing more than careful nur- 
ture to be brought to flower in the later stages. 
But when they come to the serious study of liter- 
ature in school or college, it presents itself to them 
as a part of the c grind '; it must be pursued in a 
certain prescribed way, which is likely enough the 
wrong way ; it is treated as if it were geometry or 



Education in 

linguistics ; and the needs of the individual are lost 
sight of in the application of the system. 

It seems to us a fundamental principle that any- 
thing like rigidity in the methods employed for 
the teaching of literature and the development of 
literary taste will necessarily prove fatal to suc- 
cess. In physics or in philology, the ' course ' is 
a perfectly rational device ; it is of the essence of 
training in such subjects that the work should be 
logical in its development. The path of least re- 
sistance is in them the same, or nearly the same, 
for all normally constituted minds. It is ob- 
viously the path to be followed, and the treatment 
of a class en bloc becomes not only possible but 
desirable. With literature the case is very dif- 
ferent, and the path of least resistance must be 
discovered for each individual separately. The 
imagination is a wayward faculty, and atrophy is 
likely to follow upon the attempt abruptly to di- 
vert it into channels other than those it listeth 
to seek. The facts of literature may be appre- 
hended by the intellect thus constrained, but that 
emotional accompaniment which makes of liter- 
ature a personal message to the individual, which 



/ 



ii2 Little Leaders 

enshrines it, along with music and religion, in the 
most sacred recesses of the soul, is not to be co- 
erced. Mere didactics are as powerless to impart 
the message of literature as they are to impart the 
message of music or of religion. The reward of 
such an attempt may be theology or counterpoint, 
formal rhetoric or literary history ; but not that 
spiritual glow which is the one thing worth the 
having, that kindling of the soul which comes, 
perhaps when least expected, with the hearing of 
some ineffable strain, or the reading of some 
lightning-tipped verse. 

There are manv, no doubt, poor in emotional 
endowment, and unresponsive to the finer spiritual 
vibrations aroused by the masterpieces of verbal 
art, to whom literature has hardly more meaning 
than nature had for the yokel of Wordsworth's 
hackneyed ballad. To one of this class, if he 
do not actually look upon Homer from the stand- 
point of Zoilus, or share in Iago's view of the 
character of Othello, it is at least true that the 
last agony of Lear is nothing more than the death 
of an old man j for him the solemn passing of 
CEdipus 

' To the dark benign deep underworld, alone ' 



Education 113 

is only a sort of hocus-pocus, and his ears are 
deaf to the 

' Sudden music of pure peace * 

wherewith the stars seal the successive divisions 
of Dante's threefold song. 

But even for such as these the case is not alto- 
gether hopeless. The appeal of literature to the 
human soul is so manifold that it must find in 
every nature some pipes ready to be played upon. 
Dull though the sense may seem, it is at some 
point waiting to be quickened. For literature is 
life itself, in quintessential expression ; how then 
can it fail, in some of its many phases, to have 
both a meaning and a message for every human 
being ? The earliest responsive vibrations may 
be rudimentary in character, and combined in the 
simplest of harmonies. The heart may first be 
stirred by some bit of sentiment that would be 
accounted cheap by a refined taste ; the imagin- 
ation may first be fired by some grotesque Mar- 
chen, or by some wildly improbable tale of ro- 
mantic adventure. The ripest literary taste has 
such beginnings as these, and the surest apprecia- 
tion of literature is built upon such a foundation. 
Between the child, made forgetful of his surround- 



ii4 Little Leaders 

ings by the spell of ' Robinson Crusoe ' or the 
c Arabian Nights/ and the man, finding spiritual 
refreshment in Cervantes or Moliere, renewed 
strength in Milton, or solace from grief in Ten- 
nyson, there is no real break ; the delight of the 
child and the grave joy of the man are but differ- 
ent stages of the same growth, and the one is 
what makes possible the other. 

How far this development may go is a prob- 
lem to be worked out for each individual sepa- 
rately ; and there are doubtless, in each case, dis- 
tinct limitations. What we have sought to 
emphasize is just this individual nature of the 
problem, and the fact that regimentation offers no 
solution that can be accounted satisfactory. The 
approach to literature is, in our current educa- 
tional systems, hedged about with so many thorny 
obstructions that not a few young persons start 
bravely upon it only to fall by the way, disheart- 
ened at sight of the forbidding barriers erected by 
historical, linguistic, and metrical science, for the 
purpose of taking toll of all wayfarers. What- 
ever the usefulness for discipline of such subjects, 
the spirit of literature is not to be acquired by 
making chronological tables, or tracing the gen- 



Education 115 

ealogies of words, or working out the law of de- 
creasing predication. We may even sympathize 
to some extent with those who so revolt from all 
such methods as to refuse literature any place in 
the educational scheme. Turn the young per- 
son loose, they advise, in a well-stocked library, 
and let him develop his own tastes in his own 
way. He will make mistakes, they admit ; there 
will be false starts not quickly righted ; but there 
will be, in the long run, a wholesome develop- 
ment of taste, and a steady ascent to higher levels 
of appreciation. In any case, assimilation will 
not be forced, and conventional judgments will 
not be made to parade as personal convictions. 
This view has the one great merit of allowing full 
scope to individualism, but to admit that it speaks 
the last word would be to abandon altogether the 
position that educational theory is bound to main- 
tain. That the young may profit by the guidance 
of the older and wiser is as true in literature as it 
is in any other of the great intellectual concerns. 
But the needs of the individual must be recog- 
nized as they are not now recognized, if literature 
is to play its proper part in education. Each case 
must be made the subject of a special diagnosis 



n6 Little Leaders 

and a special prescription. We might apply to 
this problem the favorite formula of one of the 
schools of modern socialism : c From every man 
according to his ability ; to every man accord- 
ing to his needs ' — although it is curious to see 
a socialist precept doing service in an individualist 
cause. 



Education 117 



THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE. 

The methods made use of by our schools in the 
teaching of English literature have, for some years 
past, been in a transition stage, exhibiting a strong 
tendency toward more enlightened ways of deal- 
ing with this vastly important subject. The fer- 
ment is of the healthful type, and a fairly clarified 
product may not unreasonably be expected to re- 
sult. When Matthew Arnold declared the future 
of poetry to be immense, he expressed a truth 
whose full significance may be realized only upon 
considerable reflection and the assumption of a 
broadly philosophical standpoint from which to 
view the coming conquests of culture. The same 
idea was expressed, with something of humorous 
exaggeration, by the author of c The New Re- 
public,' in attributing to John Stuart Mill the 
opinion that c when all the greater evils of human 
life shall have been removed, the human race is 
to find its chief enjoyment in reading Words- 
worth's poetry/ To indicate the importance of 



n8 Little Leaders 

a due appreciation of literature we hardly need, 
upon this occasion, to repeat the hackneyed quo- 
tations in praise of books, from Richard de Bury 
to Carlyle ; we may surely take it for granted that, 
allowing Arnold's demand on behalf of conduct, 
for a good three-fourths of our life, a consider- 
able share of the remaining fraction may be 
claimed for literature. But if literature is to count 
for so much among our higher interests, the man- 
ner in which we set about to prepare the way for 
it is surely of the utmost importance, and any 
misdirection of energy in this preparation means 
an almost incalculable loss. 

The main reliance of primary education, in this 
important subject, has been, and still is, the 
1 reader,' supplemented by occasional outside pas- 
sages of prose and verse, generally selected with- 
out judgment, and committed to memory for the 
purpose of being ' spoken.' All ' readers ' are 
bad in the sense that their use implies a very nar- 
row limitation of the amount of matter to be read, 
and most of them are bad as regards the charac- 
ter of the selections included. The essential 
points to be insisted upon in the reading of lower 
schools are two, and two only. Nothing, abso- 



Education 119 

lutely nothing, should be read or recited that is 
not literature, and the amount of reading done 
by the child should be as large as possible. An 
ideal c reader ' might easily be compiled ; indeed, 
excellent books of the sort are now to be had. 
But the use of the c reader ' generally means wea- 
risome repetition of a limited amount of matter, 
whereas a rational method would demand very 
little repetition. The jaded interest with which 
a hapless child cons the familiar and well-thumbed 
pages is fatal to that appreciation of literature 
which it should be the first aim of primary edu- 
cation to encourage. Why, in these days of inex- 
pensive production of reading-matter, should a 
child be forced to peruse the same pages over 
and over again, until the very sight of the book is 
hateful to him ? Why should not every day 
bring to him fresh matter for the stimulation of 
his growing intelligence and imagination ? 

As for the other point upon which we should 
insist, the reading of nothing that is not worth 
reading, there can be no possible excuse for the 
kind of pabulum that is too commonly fed, by 
spoonfuls, to the mind of the young. When we 
consider the peculiarly receptive quality of the 



120 Little Leaders 

child's mind, the retentiveness whose loss he will 
so soon have occasion to mourn, the imagination 
so early to be dulled by the prosaic years to come, 
does it not seem a crime to make of these fac- 
ulties or powers anything less than the utmost 
possible, to force the free spirit into ruts and 
waste it upon inanities ? Having at hand the 
ample literature which gives expression to the 
childhood of the race, the literature of myth and 
fable, of generous impulse moving to heroic deed, 
how can a teacher be justified in substituting for 
this the manufactured and self-conscious twaddle 
that is the staple of most modern writing for chil- 
dren ? Even for the very youngest who can read 
at all, there is no lack of suitable material. The 
melodies of Mother Goose, as Mr. Scudder has 
convincingly argued, are literature in a certain 
sense, surely in a far higher sense than the nur- 
sery jingles that too often take their place. And 
when a more advanced stage has been reached, 
there is the whole world of fairy lore, the wealth 
of religious and secular story-telling, the inex- 
haustible fund of historical incident, all of which 
must be included in the outfit of the adult mind, 
and much of which is better acquired at an early 



Education 121 

age than at any other. The child who has grown 
up in ignorance of the labors of Hercules and 
Siegfried's fight with the dragon, of the wander- 
ings of Ulysses and the deeds of King Arthur, of 
Horatius at the bridge and Leonidas at Thermo- 
pylae, has missed something that cannot be given 
him later, and may justly feel himself defrauded 
of a part of his birthright. The sense of injury 
is only aggravated by finding the mind filled in- 
stead with lumber worse than useless, with recol- 
lections of the worthless stuff", only too well re- 
membered, that in childhood usurped the place 
that should have been filled by literature carefully 
selected for the value of its form or of its subject- 
matter. 

While there are indications of an approaching 
reform in the methods of reading employed by 
our lower schools, and of reform along the lines 
above drawn, the progress in this direction will 
probably be so slow as to discourage all but the 
most sanguine. As long as the management of 
our common schools remains in the hands of per- 
sons selected with little or no reference to their 
fitness for the work — and that this is generally 
the case throughout the United States is a fact 



122 Little Leaders 

that need hardly be enlarged upon — we cannot 
hope for very much. In the fields of secondary 
and still higher education the outlook is brighter, 
for the problem is being dealt with in a more en- 
lightened spirit. But the complaint that a con- 
siderable proportion of high school and college 
students have no literary aptitude whatever is still 
heard, and benumbs the efforts of many among 
the well-meaning, some of whom seem disposed 
to accept this proposition as a statement of one 
of the stubborn facts of nature. To our mind, 
the proportion will remain large as long as we do 
not attack the difficulty at its root in the very 
earliest years of school life. But we do not be- 
lieve that there is any good evidence of the pro- 
portion being large by nature. It is not, however, 
surprising, when we consider the systematic way 
in which the literary appreciation is dulled by the 
narrow and mechanical methods of so much of 
our primary education, that the healthful growth 
of this faculty, thus arrested at a critical stage, 
should in many cases be found difficult or impos- 
sible of stimulation at a later period. 

In secondary education, the old-fashioned treat- 
ment of English literature found its embodiment 



Education 123 

in a historical text-book, to be learned mostly by 
heart, accompanied sometimes by a hand-book of 
'extracts,' in which each representative writer 
received an allotment of two or three pages. 
Sometimes the history and the 'extracts' were 
jumbled together, to the still further abridgment 
of the latter. The modern method, which has 
gained much ground of late, concentrates the at- 
tention upon a few longer works and their writ- 
ers. This method is doubtless an advance upon 
the other, yet it sometimes means a reaction car- 
ried to extremes. We cannot afford to eliminate 
the historical text-book altogether, but we do need 
to have the right kind of book and to use it with 
intelligence. For the book that gives cut-and- 
dried critical formulas — a too prevalent type — 
the educator can have no use. What he wants 
is a book that shall stimulate the critical faculty 
in the student, not suppress it by supplying criti- 
cism ready-made. To direct, but not to force, 
opinion, and to encourage the widest range of 
independent reading, should be the aims of sec- 
ondary instruction in literature. As for the bare 
facts — dates, historical conditions, and the like — 
they must be learned as facts, but they are not 



124 Little Leaders 

all as lifeless as many students think them, and 
a judicious and sympathetic instructor will succeed 
in clothing many of them with such associations 
as to make their retention an easy matter. 

In college education, the reaction against the 
formal and dispiriting methods of the past has 
been very pronounced, and the study of literature 
appears to be in a state of generally healthful ac- 
tivity. In this field of education, the chief dan- 
ger seems to lie in an undue preponderance of the 
scientific spirit. The temptation to regard works 
of literature as material for minute philological 
and historical analysis is very strong, and this pro- 
cedure finds a certain warrant in the marked suc- 
cess which everywhere attends it. But the real 
question is whether the success thus obtained is 
of the sort to be desired. Does it not mean the 
intrusion of science upon a domain set apart for 
other, if not higher, purposes ? It is doubtless 
much easier to treat literature by the method of 
science than by the method of aesthetics ; but 
does not literature, thus treated, cease to assert 
its peculiar and indispensable function ? Perhaps 
it may be just as well, as the late Edward T. Mc- 
Laughlin suggested, to defer l laboratory work ' 



Education 125 

in literature c until scientists introduce literary 
methods into the laboratory/ The effects of this 
* mechanical and harshly intellectualized study ' 
are not unfairly described by the writer in the fol- 
lowing suggestive passage : 

'If the literary neophyte's attention is directed too 
largely toward facts, he may mistake the means for the 
end, and as a result of his training find the principal ob- 
ject that confronts him as he takes up new works, noth- 
ing spiritual and aesthetic, but only the task of obtaining 
exterior information, hunting down quotations, dates, and 
allusions, surveying a poem by the rod and line of a tech- 
nical phraseology, detecting parallels, and baying at the 
holes of conjectural originals, finally to emerge from his 
studies learned, but not literary.' 

It seems to us that our colleges should no longer 
permit this sort of work to masquerade as the 
study of literature, but should relegate it to the 
department of science, where it properly belongs. 
But many of our college calendars, upon compli- 
ance with this demand, would be shown com- 
pletely denuded of literary courses, which, in turn, 
might result in the much-needed provision for 
the study of literature in the true sense. It is no 
easy matter to disentangle the study of literature, 
thus conceived, from the meshes that philological 



126 Little Leaders 

and historical science have woven about it, but 
a few men have been successful in the work, and 
their example is there for the rest to follow. Men 
of this class, more than of any other, are needed 
by our colleges to-day ; and in securing such men, 
giving free scope to their activity, and recogniz- 
ing the claims of their work as no less serious 
than the claims of work in any other department, 
the colleges will do literature the best service in 
their power. 



Education 127 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION. 

The coming of democracy was the sign most 
clearly set in the social skies of our century at its 
dawn, and the triumph of the democratic spirit is 
the social phenomenon that stands out most dis- 
tinctly as we look back upon the century's course. 
From our present point of vantage, indeed, the 
democracy whose successive conquests the years 
have marked is a very different thing from the 
democracy prefigured in the vision of those gen- 
erous and ardent souls by whom its advent was 
hailed. The social ideal that once gave inspira- 
tion to the impassioned song of Shelley has be- 
come, in our own days, the not unfit recipient of 
the blatant laudation of Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
and his like. We now find no difficulty in see- 
ing what the enthusiasm of the early nineteenth 
century could not see, the fact that the coming 
of democracy meant a revolution farther-reaching 
than any merely political revolution of former 
centuries had been, and the other fact that the 






128 Little Leaders 

democratic reconstruction of society was, in its 
full meaning and effect, incalculable by any 
method of social astrology known to men. The 
virtues of democracy were alone foreseen ; its 
failings were left to be revealed by experience. 
Some of its sponsors, like Shelley, found early 
graves, dying happy in the faith. Others, like 
Wordsworth, lived to grow disheartened by the 
excesses of democracy, and sought for solace in 
new and sterile ideals. A few, like Landor, Maz- 
zini, and Hugo, of faith too robust to be broken 
by adversity, held fast to the democratic princi- 
ple, devoting themselves unswervingly to its serv- 
ice, never forgetting that through thorn-set ways 
alone men reach the stars. 

The great poet who, more than any other, has 
linked with our own the early age of hope, must, 
on the whole, be reckoned with those in whom 
the faith, although it may have faltered, has not 
failed. That ' God fulfils himself in many ways ' 
was his often repeated message to those who 
were impatient because the fulfilment was not 
immediate and in one particular way. He who 
told us, half a century ago, of his ' Vision of the 



j= 



Education 129 

World,' who sounded the true note of democracy 
in the verses, 

' Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping some- 
thing new : 

That which they have done but earnest of the things that 
they shall do,* 

never really departed from the principle then ex- 
pressed. There may, it is true, be detected a note 
of pessimism in some of Tennyson's later poems, 
but it is not the absolute pessimism that despairs 
of the future. With the old age of our century, 
to those who have grown wise with its teachings, 
the problem of democracy has shown itself to be 
one of ever-increasing complexity, and the solu- 
tion of that problem seems no longer near at 
hand. 

« Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty 
years * 

is a cry that still speaks of hope, if of hope de- 
ferred in heartsickening degree. The future be- 
longs to democracy, and is a future of fair final 
promise, yet the way to it is both dark and de- 
vious, and will doubtless lead through many dis- 
appointments, and offer many phases of retro- 



130 Little Leaders 

grade development. We may still confidently 
take ' Forward ' as our watchword, but must 

« Still remember how the course of time will swerve, 
Crook and turn upon itself in many a backward stream- 
ing curve/ 

At present, it must seem to the most thought- 
ful that democracy is in danger of becoming, if 
it has not already become, a mere c tyranny of the 
majority/ That the voice of the people is the 
voice of God is a dictum true within certain limits, 
true in its relation to the broad features of social 
organization, but profoundly false when applied 
to the special problems of society. For the solu- 
tion of the special problem we must look to the 
expert ; and the untrained masses, however praise- 
worthy their intention, can be expected to solve 
such problems only in a blundering and probably 
disastrous fashion, Only in an ideal society, a 
society that should have eliminated the ' remnant ' 
by growth to the c remnant ' level of intelligence 
and culture, could the vox populi safely be left to 
decide upon the delicate questions of education, 
economics, and social ethics that somehow have 
to be decided by and for the people as a whole. 
Even the Athenian democracy, far surpassing any 



.-^* 



Education 131 

modern democracy in versatile capabilities and 
intelligence, made sad work of some of the spe- 
cial problems that it was called upon to solve. 

The lesson above all others, then, that democ- 
racy has yet to learn, is the lesson of restraint. 

No doubt 

' It is excellent 
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous 
To use it like a giant.* 

In the first flush of conscious power, it is not sur- 
prising that our nineteenth century democracy 
should have sought to regulate all sorts of mat- 
ters that really call for the trained judgment of 
the specialist. The democracy of the twentieth 
century will, we trust, choose the wiser part of 
delegating its powers to agents specially chosen 
with regard to fitness for special work. It will 
realize the unspeakable foolishness of submitting 
scientific questions to popular vote. It will 
abandon the detestable practice of requiring its 
representatives to act as mere automata, and will 
instead choose them for their wisdom and leave 
them to act according to its dictates. 

This may seem a hopelessly optimistic fore- 
cast, yet upon its eventuation the future of civ- 



132 



Little Leaders 



ilizatitan depends. In spite of its manifold suc- 
cesses^, democracy is still upon trial, and those 
who -gird against it, from Carlyle to Maine, 
rightly fix upon the tendency above described as 
the m ost vulnerable feature of popular govern- 
ment. 1 The history of our own country is par- 
ticularly rich in illustrations of democratic inepti- 
tude or failure, and so is peculiarly instructive to 
the st l udent of political institutions. We have 
settled too many questions calling for extensive 
knowledge and ripe judgment by the rough 
method of the popular vote. Much of our pub- 
lic policy, so far as it has to do with economics 
and finance, has thus been shaped in direct defi- 
ance of the fundamental principles of those sub- 
jects, bringing upon ourselves disaster, and earn- 
ing for us the mingled amusement and contempt 
of ot'her countries. If the vagaries of our eco- 
nomic legislation have thus contributed to the 
gaiety of nations, the way in which we have dealt 
with bur international complications has contrib- 
uted f.o their righteous indignation. 

Perhaps the most searching test of our democ- 
racy will be supplied by its attitude toward public 
education. Fortunately, the Constitution of our 



— • 



Education 133 

Federal Government does not permit of educa- 
tional centralization, and so makes a dull uni- 
formity impossible. We shall always have in- 
structive contrasts in systems and methods, and 
with them a constant spur to progress. Yet the 
centralization possible within the limits of the 
state, or even of the large city, has its dangers, 
and it too often happens that the educational 
forces of a considerable community are controlled 
by ignorance, and made ineffective by deference 
to uneducated opinion. Many of our state uni- 
versities and the public schools of many of our 
large cities have to make all sorts of concessions 
to the spirit that insists upon a narrow practicality 
in education, and that almost wholly ignores the 
real objects of school and college training. State 
legislatures are never, and city school boards are 
rarely, composed of persons fit to exercise judg- 
ment in technical questions of education ; yet 
these bodies are constantly engaged in meddle- 
some efforts to nullify the work of the profes- 
sional educators whom they employ, and to 
whom, having once delegated the necessary au- 
thority, they should leave the most complete free- 
dom of action. Such matters as the selection of 



134 Little Leaders 

teachers and of text-books, of the arrangement 
of curricula and the conditions of promotion and 
graduation, should, as a matter of course, be left 
to professional educators. When we consider 
the fact that these matters are, nevertheless, very 
generally controlled by political boards and legis- 
latures, it is surprising that our schools and col- 
leges should have made as creditable a record as 
they have succeeded in doing. It is not long 
since the Governor of Illinois publicly scoffed at 
the best educational ideals that the experience of 
the ages has established ; and at about the same 
time a crusade of ignorance, led by the news- 
papers, threatened to seriously cripple the work 
of public education in Chicago. 

When such occurrences have to be chronicled, 
it is clear that democracy has yet to learn its most 
important lesson. But it will not do to say that 
our century was not ready for the democratic ex- 
periment. The analogy between the individual 
and the nation is always a valuable one, and in ap- 
plication to this case its teaching is clear that only 
in the hard school of experience is real growth 
to be secured. If only the nation were as quick 
as the individual to profit by the teachings of ex- 



Education 135 

perience ! But the lessons are so soon forgotten, 
the nation is so wont to recur to the old sicken- 
ing round of delusion, folly, and disaster, that 
only the most sanguine souls can steadfastly re- 
sist the promptings of despair and look forward 
with unabated confidence to the reign of reason 
and intelligence in which all the hopes of democ- 
racy must be centred. 



136 Little Leaders 



THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN 
SPEECH. 
The coming conquests of the English language 
constitute a theme much favored in the discus- 
sions of debating societies and the orations of col- 
lege commencements. With anyone born to our 
English speech it must, indeed, be a matter of 
pride that the language of Shakespeare should 
have won a secure foothold in North America 
and South Africa, in India, in Australia, and in 
the Isles of the Sea. But the pride thus gratified 
by a superficial view of the growth already 
achieved and the growth probably to be recorded 
in the years to come is tempered when, upon 
closer observation, we realize that this extension 
in area of the English language is likely to have 
deterioration in quality for a concomitant. How- 
ever desirable may be the increased use of our 
language by the nations of the earth, we cannot 
regard with equanimity the tendency of the lan- 
guage, in its territorial extensions, to assume cor- 
rupt dialectic forms. 






Education 137 

The power of literature to give fixity to speech 
is very great, but we cannot blindly count upon 
it for the impossible. The language of Italy was 
cast in definite mould by the genius of Dante, 
and it still retains the impress given it six centu- 
ries ago, but we must recollect that this language 
has never been called upon to meet the test of 
transplantation to another soil, and adoption by a 
mixed, and in part, therefore, an alien race. So 
the English language, in its native environment, 
is still substantially the language fixed by Chau- 
cer and Shakespeare, but observers are not want- 
ing who declare that the English language, trans- 
planted to the American continent, is undergoing 
radical changes, and becoming a dialect of the 
parent form of speech. Of course we are not 
to expect anything like a repetition of the process 
by which the Latin language, crossing Alps and 
Pyrenees, underwent first corruption and then 
transformation. The solidarity of modern civil- 
ization makes that impossible. All countries hav- 
ing a common language are linked together by 
bonds that will never permit the speech of one 
to become unintelligible to the inhabitants of the 
other. 



138 Little Leaders 

But, while retaining a common intelligibility, 
it is quite possible for the offsets of our language 
to become so differentiated one from the other 
that they may fairly be described as dialects, and 
this is a danger which everyone familiar with 
what is best and noblest in our common literary 
inheritance will be quick to appreciate. We do 
not now refer to the incorporation of those new 
words made necessary by a new environment, 
and illustrated by the Pacific Coast stories of Mr. 
Harte, the Indian tales of Mr. Kipling, and the 
novels and poems of Australian writers. Nor do 
we refer to those developments of idiom taken on 
by all living languages, and the necessary sign of 
their vitality. But we do refer to the mushroom 
growths of speech that spring up everywhere 
among us, the modes of expression that result 
from mere slovenliness of mind, and find no war- 
rant either in the genius of the language or in the 
necessities of the situation. These linguistic 
abortions are encouraged by a press unworthy of 
its function because unfaithful to its trust, and 
accepted by an easy-going and uncritical public, 
too eager in its desire for the new thing, and too 
heedless in its tolerance of the short cut which 






Education 139 

generally means incomplete expression, of the 
barbarism which usually defeats the very purpose 
of expression. 

The language that is spoken by the people of 
this country is the language that is read in their 
popular literature — in their newspapers, maga- 
zines, and paper-covered novels — and is not a 
language in which they have reason to take pride. 
A great share of the writing done for our news- 
papers is done by uneducated persons, and offends 
every instinct of literary decency. A higher 
standard is offered by the best of our magazines, 
but few can resist the temptation of a well-known 
name, and any sort of notoriety is a passport to 
the pages of all but three or four of them. The 
oldest and for many years the most dignified of 
our reviews has been degraded to the level of the 
sensational daily paper, and offers to its readers 
of to-day as few well-written pages as it offered 
of ill-written pages to its readers of a generation 
ago. Of the kind of English in which most of 
our popular novels are written the less that is said 
the better. But we may remark that the real- 
istic tendency of recent fiction has to answer, 
among many other sins, for that of fastening upon 



140 Little Leaders 

the minds of its readers the grossest solecisms of 
uneducated speech. Anything is permissible in 
the conversations of its characters, for is it not 
the function of Realism to represent people as 
they act and speak ? So the illiterate writer has 
only to select his types of characters from the 
uneducated crowd, and is then free to pen the 
sort of English to which he is accustomed. If, 
by chance, the ' piebald jargon ' which he places 
upon their lips passes over into the descriptive 
and other passages in which the writer speaks for 
himself, the average reader will hold the offence 
of little weight, if it even attracts his attention. 
The degradation of the American language 
from the high standard still measurably preserved 
in the parent country is a phenomenon of the 
gravest significance. We are not now concerned 
with the quibbling about c Americanisms ' and 
c Briticisms ' that has supplied amusement to many 
ingenious controversialists. There is about as 
much to say upon one side of that question as 
upon the other, and the game appears to be drawn. 
The question now before us is not that of cer- 
tain objectionable locutions — whether their ori- 
gin be English or American ; it is the far more 



Education 141 

serious question of how far the American lan- 
guage has become an inferior dialect of the En- 
glish. Those of our writers who resent any 
imputation of this sort usually ignore the real 
question altogether. They seek to divert atten- 
tion from it either by childish tu quoque arguments, 
or by resort to vague generalizations upon the 
fluctuations to which all living languages are sub- 
ject. They eloquently oppose ' the wild flowers 
of speech, plucked betimes with the dew still on 
them, humble and homely and touching,' to c the 
waxen petals of rhetoric as a schoolmaster ar- 
ranges them/ To the writer who has arrayed 
for us these touchingly contrasted figures 'the 
grammarian, the purist, the pernicketty stickler 
for trifles, is the deadly foe of good English, rich 
in idioms and racy of the soil.' That American 
English is, on the whole, as good as any other, 
that its peculiarities are but the evidences of a 
healthful vitality, is the sum of the plea urged by 
these zealous linguistic patriots. 

But the question is not to be thus flippantly 
disposed of. Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who is, we 
must remember, an American, although he has 
lived in England for many years, replies to the 



142 Little Leaders 

sort of apologists above cited in the following 
emphatic terms : c With those who, either from 
denseness of ignorance or from aesthetic insen- 
sibility, deliver themselves in this uncritical fash- 
ion, it would be squandering words to argue : they 
must be left to perish in their pravity.' And he 
goes on to say : c More or less, as much as the 
language of Scotland, American English, as a 
whole, has already come to be a dialect ; and day 
by day it entitles itself more and more to that 
designation/ These quotations are taken from 
an article published by Dr. Hall in the London 
4 Academy ' after it had been declined by l two 
American periodicals.' The greater part of the 
article is devoted to a list of c locutions which go 
far to realize finished debasement/ taken from a 
book by one of our better American writers. 
Although exception may be taken to some of Dr. 
Hall's illustrations, the majority of them are 
clearly examples of bad English. That it is diffi- 
cult for an American to avoid writing bad En- 
glish he freely admits, and the passage in which 
the admission is made, although somewhat long, 
is of so great interest that it deserves to be repro- 
duced here in full. 



Education 



H:5 



« If egotism for a moment is pardonable, no false sham e 
deters me from avowing that, though I have lived awajy 
from America upwards of forty-six years, I feel, to thijs 
hour, in writing English that I am writing a foreign lan- 
guage, and that, if not incessantly on my guard, I arip 
in peril of stumbling. Nor will it be amiss for any Amer- 
ican, when experimenting like myself, to feel as I do, anJi 
never to relax his vigilance, if he would not every noviV 
and then reveal himself, needlessly and to his prejudiced 
as an exotic. Not for five minutes can he listen to thfC 
conversation of his fellow-countrymen, or for that lengt'h 
of time read one of their newspapers, or one of such bookfs 
as they usually write, without exposure to the influence 
of some expression which is not standard English. Trjy 
as he will to resist this influence, successful resistance tjo 
it is well-nigh impossible. On the other hand, if he is 
indifferent about resisting it, his fancied English will, a 
thousand to one, be chequered with solecisms, crudenesse:j*» 
and piebald jargon, of the sort which the pages of Mr.^ 
Stowe, Mr. E. P. Roe, and Mr. Howells have rendered 
familiar. In short, the language of an American is, a^l 
but inevitably, more or less dialectal. 1 

That Dr. Hall speaks with authority few wiP 
be bold enough to dispute. And, although h|e 
does not suggest any definite remedy for the in- 
sidious disease that has attacked our language, hie 
clearly believes that remedies are yet availably 



'444 Little Leaders 

fi century from now, he says, our population will 
tpe several times that of Great Britain. 

« Circumstances generated by unprecedented combina- 
tions have entailed on us a recognizable dialect, and one 
vvhich is rapidly developing. Whether it is fated to re- 
main a dialect is a hazardous speculation. Yet, unless 
we chance to breed a matter of half a dozen Shakespeares 
aind Miltons, it will hardly, without great purification, 
rjeach the dignity of a substantive language. But, be its 
eventual status what it may, that which should especially 
\yeigh with us is its unquestionable destiny to serve as the 
r.nother-tongue of hundreds of millions. Towards the 
shaping of it, so that our successors shall do us credit, 
We can contribute consciously. Most surely it behoves 
lis, therefore, to take measures, and take them promptly, 
to the end that, so far as may prove feasible, its evolution 
he controlled by proficients in knowledge and taste, and 
n.ot by sciolists and vulgarians.* 

What these measures should be, we are left to 
d etermine. Half a century ago, writing, mutatis 
mutandis, upon the same subject, Schopenhauer 
proposed in all seriousness that the State should 
t ake a hand in the matter, and establish a system 
of linguistic censorship of the press, with penalties 
for the misuse of words, for syntactical errors, 
a nd for c impudent mockery of grammar/ c Is the 
C jerman language outlawed ? ' he exclaimed, c too 



Education 145 

insignificant to deserve the legal protection en- 
joyed by every dung-hill ? ' So heroic a remedy 
as this is hardly within our reach, and we must 
look for aid to educational systems rather than to 
legislatures. By wisely directed education, and 
by that alone, may we hope to come once more 
into secure possession of the rich heritage, so 
nearly lost, of the speech of Shakespeare and of 
Tennyson. To accomplish this we must improve 
the methods of our elementary education, and must 
make our higher education higher still. We must 
strengthen at all points the study of the English 
languages and literature ; we must insist upon the 
acquaintance, from childhood up, with only good 
models of style ; we must make the proper ex- 
pression of thought, in every department of work, 
an aim concurrent with that of acquiring the spe- 
cial subject-matter of the study pursued. 



146 Little Leaders 



THE USE AND ABUSE OF DIALECT. 

There are indications — not very marked as yet, 
but still indications — that the day of the dialect 
versifier and story-teller is waning. The literary 
epidemic for which he is responsible has raged 
with unabated virulence in this country for the 
past ten years or more. It has had almost com- 
plete possession of the bric-a-brac popular maga- 
zine. Its contagion has even extended to those 
periodicals which we too fondly fancied to stand 
for the dignities, as opposed to the freaks, of lit- 
erature. At the other extreme, it has been dis- 
seminated and vulgarized by the newspaper and 
the popular reciter. A few of the men and wo- 
men whom we count as real forces in American 
letters have been numbered among its victims. 
But all epidemics exhaust themselves in time, and 
we are encouraged to believe that this one is nearly 
spent. A tabulation of the contents of our pop- 
ular magazines would now, we think, show a 
smaller proportion of pages unreadable for their 



Education 147 

bad spelling than would have been disclosed by a 
similar investigation made two years ago. The 
journalist, having for a time done his best to 
spread the fashion of dialect, is now aiming at it 
the shafts of his dull yet not ineffective satire. 
Many a literary worker is beginning to suspect 
that to misspell as many words as possible is not 
exactly the noblest of ambitions. Best of all, the 
whole fabric of realism — that is, of the crude pho- 
tographic realism so noisily trumpeted by its de- 
fenders — is crumbling away, to make room in due 
time, we trust, for the true realism of the masters; 
and with this fabric there falls whatever theoret- 
ical defense of the dialect poem or novel may 
heretofore have seemed plausible. 

We by no means anticipate the complete dis- 
appearance of the dialect element from our imag- 
inative literature, nor would such a reaction be 
desirable. But we do expect the time to come 
when dialect shall occupy its proper place in com- 
position, and be treated as a means rather than 
as an end. There is an important distinction 
between the story written for the sake of dialect 
and the use of dialect for the sake of the story ; 
the latter practice is as excusable or even praise- 



148 Little Leaders 

worthy as the former is reprehensible. The ques- 
tion is one between a writer and his own con- 
science. Let the story-teller ask himself this 
question : Is it my purpose to produce a faithful 
yet idealized transcript of life, with its joys and 
its sorrows, with its tender human relationships 
and its grim struggle for the mastery of adverse 
conditions, the use of dialect being one of the ele- 
ments necessary to the representation of essential 
truth ; or am I merely taking advantage of a cur- 
rent fashion that tends to degrade the literary art, 
and, making of a grotesque orthography the raison 
d'etre of my work, adding just enough of descrip- 
tion and fancy and pathos to give my work the 
verisimilitude needed for it to pass muster at all ? 
Most writers have sufficient conscience to answer 
this question truthfully, if squarely put ; if they 
shirk the answer for themselves, they may be sure 
that the public, sooner or later, will find it for 
them. And the ultimate verdict of the only pub- 
lic worth writing for will never be favorable to 
the workman who fails to recognize the impera- 
tive obligation of this higher sort of conscientious- 
ness. 

When used with discrimination and artistic 






Education 149 

restraint, dialect is, of course, an admissible ele- 
ment in both poetry and fiction. English litera- 
ture would be far the poorer without the treas- 
ures of Scotch dialect preserved in the poems of 
Burns and the novels of the author of c Waver- 
ley.' Likewise, we could ill spare the work of 
the Provencal poets from the literature of France, 
of Goldoni's Venetian comedies from that of 
Italy, or of Reuter's Plattdeutsch tales from that 
of Germany. In all these cases, the work sim- 
ply could not have been done at all without the 
employment of dialect ; yet no one would ven- 
ture to assert that the exploitation of a dialect 
was the prime motive that led to the composition 
of 'Tarn O'Shanter' or 'The Antiquary,' of 
4 Mireio 'or c II Carnovale di Venezia ' or c Ut 
Mine Stromtid.' These are all instances of a 
richly endowed artistic nature finding expression 
in the medium most natural for his purpose. Even 
in our own country, a similar plea may be made 
for the language of Hosea Biglow, or of Mr. 
Cable's Creoles, or of Miss Murfree's Tennessee 
mountaineers. But the swarm of commonplace 
and uninspired scribblers of dialect that have 
descended upon our periodical press during the 



150 Little Leaders 

past decade need not hope to find a safe refuge 
in the shadow of such really significant names as 
have been cited ; their pretensions are too utterly 
without warrant and their productions too en- 
tirely without justification. Not Lowell, but 
'Josh Billings/ is their model and Great Ex- 
ample. 

No discussion of the abuse of dialect that should 
omit the educational view would be adequate. 
The corrupting influence that may hardly be es- 
caped by adult readers is tenfold more serious in 
its effect upon the growing mind. The preva- 
lence of dialect in the papers and magazines that 
provide young people with most of their reading 
puts a new and formidable difficulty in the way 
of teachers and parents. Even the books put into 
our schools as models for the guidance of the 
young — the school ' readers ' themselves — often 
contain examples of perverted diction that can- 
not fail to exert an evil influence upon the im- 
pressionable years of childhood. Upon this aspect 
of our subject, we cannot do better than quote 
some pointed observations from a paper by Pro- 
fessor Willis Boughton, of Ohio University. Mr. 
Boughton says : 



Education 151 

< For the past decade some of our most popular period- 
icals have been furnishing their readers with a weekly or 
monthly diet of dialect stories. A handful of editors 
have declared that the people want such literature, and it 
is produced. Instead of romances in cultivated language, 
we are introduced to most ordinary characters who use 
most ordinary folk lore. The Christmas story, Mr. 
Ho wells asserts, is written in the '« Yankee dialect and 
its Western modifications." Even our verse is corrupted. 
Notice a stanza reproduced from a leading magazine : 

«' I 'm been a visitin' 'bout a week 
To my little cousin's at Nameless Creek, 
An' I 'm got the hives an' a new straw hat 
An' I'm come back home where my beau lives at." 

What literature! If the magazine, one of the greatest 
educational factors in our country, will tolerate such lan- 
guage ; if you and I read it, and smile at it, and quote 
it, the Cincinnati teacher may be pardoned for the use of 
language that shocked Dr. Rice. To preserve the speech 
of a vanishing people, dialect literature may be justified j 
but to propagate such language is vicious. At school, 
the teacher may dwell at length upon the linguistic beau- 
ties of the "Village Blacksmith"} but on Friday after- 
noon some urchin declaims : 

"The Gobble-uns' 'ill git you 
Ef you don't watch out," 

and soon all the children in the district are repeating his 
words. Why the offspring of even polite society are prone 
to use bad English need be no longer a matter of wonder.' 



152 Little Leaders 

1 To propagate such language is vicious.' The 
words are none too strong, and we thank Mr. 
Boughton for them, hoping that the protest he 
raises will be echoed by educators everywhere. 
These are some of the abuses of dialect ; what, 
then, are its uses ? To what fruitful end may 
we divert the effort now worse than wasted by 
the dialect-mongers of our periodical literature ? 
By substituting a scientific for an artistic purpose, 
by making a serious study of dialect instead of 
playing with it. The facts of dialect speech, as 
distinguished from the inventions of the news- 
paper humorist, are of great importance to the 
history of language. No more important lin- 
guistic work remains to be done in this country 
than that of recording the thousands of local vari- 
ations of our speech from what may be called 
standard English. To fix these colloquialisms 
in time and place, to trace them to their origins, 
to construct speech-maps embodying the salient 
facts of popular usage wherever it has distinctive 
features — these are scientific aims of the worth- 
iest. Work of this sort is being energetically 
carried on by a constantly-increasing number of 
observers in this country ; but the ranks still call 



Education 153 

for additions, and new-comers will be heartily 
welcomed. As a coordinating agency for such 
scattered contributions to knowledge, the Amer- 
ican Dialect Society, founded in 1889, is, in a 
quiet way, establishing important scientific con- 
clusions. The lay observer is hardly competent 
to make the finer distinctions in pronunciation 
that come within the scope of the trained phone- 
tician, but he can be extremely useful in the col- 
lection of vocabularies. The Society asks him 
to do two things for each peculiar word or idiom 
that comes to his notice — c first, to fix the fact 
that it occurs in dialect usage in a sense differing 
from standard English, and, secondly, to fix the 
local limits of this usage.' All such variations 
from the normal c represent just the class of facts 
on which the scientific study of language rests. 
Many of them are survivals from older periods 
of the language ; many new words are formed or 
adopted to meet a real need arising from new 
conditions, and so ultimately gain a place in stand- 
ard English ; and many variations in pronuncia- 
tion illustrate phonetic changes which are con- 
stantly going on in language development. The 
philologist needs to know, from a more reliable 



154 Little Leaders 

source than the ordinary novelist furnishes, the 
exact locality where each word or phrase is used 
(implying, also, a knowledge of where it is not 
used ) ; just what it means to those who use it, 
and what local variations there are, if any, in its 
form and meaning ; just when each new word 
came in or old one went out of use.' If, per- 
chance, our little sermon on the use and abuse of 
dialect should turn even one misguided realist 
from a grinder-out of dialect ' copy ' for the news- 
papers into an exact observer of local usage for 
the scientific purposes of the Society, it will not 
have been preached in vain. 



Education 155 



READING AND EDUCATION. 

In these days of multiplied universities and de- 
grees, when a young man or woman of earnest 
purpose is rarely so handicapped by adverse en- 
vironment as to be quite unable to get the higher 
education in the academic sense of that term, it 
is possible that we attach too much importance 
to the culture that is based purely upon scholastic 
titles. Historical examples without end prove to 
us that culture of the finest type has been attain- 
able outside the walls of any institution of learn- 
ing, and there is no reason to doubt that the pro- 
cess which has produced self-educated men in the 
past is equally available and effective at the present 
time. Indeed, it may be urged that the man intel- 
lectually self-made, if his achievement show him 
to be really educated, has an advantage over the 
man who has found the ways of learning smoothed 
for him, the rough places levelled, and the nat- 
ural impediments to progress cleared away by 
other hands than his own. It is he who best 



156 Little Leaders 

knows the value of what has been so hardly ac- 
quired ; his attainment has a substance and a solid- 
ity that the most brilliant of university careers 
may fail to give. After all, the test of culture, 
outside of narrow academic circles, is not based 
upon such external things as degrees and fellow- 
ships, but upon capacity, upon evidence of the 
finer issues of thought and feeling, and the power 
to quicken other spirits to those issues. 

Perhaps the most important of educational 
institutions is that which everyone may have at 
his door, or even within arm's reach — a well filled 
set of book-shelves. Having this, we have, how- 
ever socially isolated, the ' means of getting to 
know, on all matters which most concern us, the 
best which has been thought and said in the 
world.' One is almost ashamed to make so hack- 
neyed a phrase do duty once more, but Matthew 
Arnold seized the root of the matter, and if the 
thing needs to be repeated at all, it can hardly be 
done otherwise than in his words. Reading is a 
very serious affair, one of the most serious that 
there are ; yet how few realize both in thought 
and act its educational possibilities. A man's 
library, assuming it to be for use and not for dis- 






Education 157 

play, is a better index to his character than the 
most detailed of external biographies. Show us 
the man at work in his library, and we view him 
in his essence, not in his seeming. There is no 
greater educational problem than that of persuad- 
ing men and women everywhere — not merely the 
few favored by training and predisposition — to 
surround themselves with books of the right sort, 
and to make the right use of them. Our popu- 
lar educational movements, our Chautauqua cir- 
cles and University Extension courses, are all 
working in this direction, although rather aim- 
lessly and with much misdirection of energy ; 
what we need is more persistent and systematic 
endeavor — effort duly elastic and individual in 
adaptation while still systematic — on the part of 
all who are occupied with the diverse phases of 
the educational movement. Every teacher, every 
librarian, every popular lecturer, every writer for 
magazine or newspaper, can do something for 
the common cause by way of influence ; every 
private individual, in his own circle of acquaint- 
ances, can at least do something by way of ex- 
ample. 

The average adult, whose intellectual environ- 



158 Little Leaders 

ment seems to be a matter of choice, is really 
subjected to influences that are not easy to resist. 
The modern newspaper, with its bad writing and 
its vulgar ideals, the popular magazine, with its 
ephemeral or sensational programme, the cheap 
book, even cheaper in its contents than in its me- 
chanical execution — these are the temptations 
that beset his every spare hour, and deprive him 
of communion with the great spirits who stand 
ready to tell him ' the best which has been thought 
and said in the world.' ' Will you go and gos- 
sip with your housemaid or your stable-boy, when 
you may talk with queens and kings ; or flatter 
yourself that it is with any worthy consciousness 
of your own claims to respect that you jostle with 
the hungry and common crowd for entree here, 
and audience there, while all the while this eternal 
court is open to you, with its society, wide as the 
world, multitudinous as its days, — the chosen and 
the mighty of every place and time ? ' None of 
us can altogether escape the distracting influence 
of the commonplace writing that on every hand 
insinuates itself into our acquaintance ; yet if we 
content ourselves with such work, if we do not 
resolutely reject its impudent pretension of suf- 



Education 159 

ficiency, we miss the most effective means for 
the realization of our better selves. Every reader 
ought now and then to fortify himself against 
temptation by reading some such essay as Mr. 
Ruskin's on ' Kings' Treasuries,' or Mr. Mor- 
ley's on ' The Study of Literature/ or Mr. Har- 
rison's on ' The Choice of Books ' — not for their 
commendation of particular lines of reading, or 
to blindly acquiesce in their individual dicta, but 
for their lofty standpoint, their liberal outlook, 
and their tonic effect. 

The foundations of the reading habit are, of 
course, laid in childhood ; and the responsibility 
for these foundations is one of the greatest that 
the professional educator has to bear. The child 
should be as carefully guided in the choice of his 
reading as the adult should be free to determine 
what is best for his own spiritual needs. How 
precious are the years from six to sixteen, with 
their eager receptivity and their retentive grasp,, 
seems to be but imperfectly understood by the 
directors of our schools. It is hardly less than 
criminal to provide children of such an age with 
the namby-pamby artificial reading that is now 
manufactured for their use. A child's reading 



160 Little Leaders 

should be confined to the very best literature that 
he is capable of understanding — and it is aston- 
ishing what he will understand if given a chance. 
Nor should he be kept upon short rations for the 
purpose of drill in vocal expression. Fresh mat- 
ter is always better than old for discipline, and 
the most vitalizing pages lose their power for 
good if too frequently conned. The childish 
desire for new worlds to conquer is very strong, 
and is sure to find vent in the wrong direction if 
not freely indulged in the right one. 

The high school and college period of educa- 
tion is essentially that in which the student is 
trained to shift for himself. It is the period when 
restrictions upon reading must be relaxed, and 
freedom of choice watchfully encouraged. Some- 
where within this period of intellectual adoles- 
cence there comes a transitional stage which tests 
all the training of the previous years. The duty 
of those who are responsible for the student 
during this critical period is rather to stimulate 
than to direct his reading ; to encourage him in 
looking beyond the horizon of his text-books, to 
make it easy and pleasant for him to read in help- 
ful lines ; to throw all sorts of unobtrusive obsta- 



Education 161 

cles in his path, if he exhibits any tendency toward 
intellectual dissipation. The school or college 
library is, next to the wise instructor, an essen- 
tial factor in this problem, and the studies of his- 
tory and literature, of the ancient and modern 
languages, are those upon which reliance must 
mainly be placed in this task of making of formal 
education a real preparation for life. We have 
of late years witnessed a remarkable expansion 
in the scientific departments of school and col- 
lege, and a greatly increased expenditure for their 
adjuncts of laboratory and museum. The expan- 
sion was needed, and no educator can intelli- 
gently begrudge it. But the group of studies 
which find in the library both museum and lab- 
oratory — the studies which we rightfully call 
humanities and for which we thereby claim the 
place of first importance and of closest relation- 
ship to our deepest spiritual needs — may fairly 
demand as much attention and as large an expen- 
diture as the sciences of nature. It is not too 
much to ask that every dollar set apart for scien- 
tific apparatus shall be matched by another dol- 
lar set apart for literary apparatus. The student 
of history or of literature ought to have the use 



1 62 Little Leaders 

of his own set of books, just as the student of 
chemistry has the use of his own set of reagents. 
When the humanities come again into their own, 
this necessity will be recognized as fully as the 
necessity of laboratory teaching in chemistry is 
now recognized. 

Given the right guidance in childhood, and the 
right influences during adolescence, the reading 
habit may be counted upon to remain a genuine 
educational influence through life. The import- 
ance of such guidance and such influences can 
hardly be over-estimated. But for those who 
have missed them, for those who in the future 
will miss them, there is still the consoling truth 
that serious aims coupled with earnest endeavor 
can nearly always find the path to a very com- 
plete culture. ' The best which has been thought 
and said in the world,' like the sunlight, shines 
freely for all, and to it the veriest mole may, if 
he will, grope his way. ' Reading maketh a full 
man,' and more than that no scheme of formal 
education, however extensive, may accomplish. 



Education 163 



SUMMER READING. 

There are many, doubtless, to whom the sug- 
gestion of a summer vacation largely devoted to 
reading, particularly if undertaken with profitable 
intent, will seem little better than a counsel of 
perfection. The strained nerves and the weary 
brain demand, they will urge, that whatever weeks 
or months may be annually snatched from the 
grasp of toil should be given up to recreation in 
its primitive sense, to the renewing of the ex- 
hausted vitality, to the rebuilding of the wasted 
tissue. At such times, the only books of which 
they will hear are those which the best authority 
tells us are to be found in running brooks, and 
the only sermons to which they are disposed to 
listen are the mute discourses of the stones upon 
sea-cliff" or mountain-side. And there is undoubt- 
edly a degree of tension, reached by many in our 
feverish latter-age, from which relief is only pos- 
sible upon condition of a complete, if temporary, 
abandonment of civilization with all its devices. 



164 Little Leaders 

We are impelled for a brief space to relapse into 
barbarism, and, seeking new strength by contact 
with the bare earth, to realize in our own expe- 
rience the myth of Antaeus. 

But such relapses are not for long, and, the 
first joy of freedom and relaxation being at an 
end, the mental activities quickly reassert their 
need of occupation. The pendulum of life has 
soon swung all the way from the unendurable 
strain of daily recurrent labor to the equally un- 
endurable ennui of prolonged idleness. The pure 
joy of existence may suffice for the moment, but 
the sense of vacuity sets in after awhile, and 
imperatively calls for some form of diversion that 
shall not leave Nature to do all the recreative 
work. At such times, more forcibly perhaps 
than at any others, books offer us their serviceable 
solace, and we congratulate ourselves upon the 
instinctive foresight that led us to provide our- 
selves with such companions. Then, reclining 
upon shaded lawn or veranda, upon deck or sea- 
shore or pine -clad mountain slope, fortified 
against the intrusions of care, and at peace with 
all the world, we enjoy in equal measure the min- 
istries of Nature and of Art, as far removed from 



Education 165 

ennui as from toil, and the discords of life are 
resolved into the richest of harmonies. 

What books are best suited to the needs of the 
long summer days ? We have known a young 
man, in contemplation of an ocean voyage, to 
take with him the ' Kritik der Reinen Vernunft.' 
Luckily there was a library on the ship, and Kant 
remained undisturbed at the bottom of the trav- 
eller's trunk. On the other hand, there are too 
many people whose idea of a summer's literary 
provision becomes embodied in a package of 
ephemeral novels of varying degrees of unreality 
or imbecility, and an armful of illustrated period- 
icals. We hardly know which of the two ex- 
tremes thus illustrated deserves the severer cen- 
sure, but if either case is to have our sympathies 
it must be that of the Kantian student rather than 
that of the c Dodo '- laden excursionist. The 
former, at least, has a rational motive, if his judg- 
ment be woefully at fault ; the latter is, however 
unconsciously, doing his best to waste a golden 
opportunity. 

The rational person will take neither Kant nor 
1 Dodo ' to his place of summer resort, for he will 
know that there is a grateful mean between the 



1 66 Little Leaders 

substantial but not easily digestible quality of the 
one and the mere frothiness of the other. He 
will know, for one thing, that there is an abun- 
dance of literature which is of the very best, 
yet which makes no strenuous demand upon the 
faculties, which can hold the attention without 
conscious effort, so smooth is the flow and so har- 
monious the form. What reading, for example, 
could be more ideally fit for the long summer 
afternoons than the poetry of the c Faerie Queene ' 
or the c Earthly Paradise,' the prose of the ' Pen- 
tameron ' or l Marius the Epicurean ' ? Such 
reading as this becomes a permanent intellectual 
possession, an influence moulding imagination 
and character, and the retrospective charm natu- 
rally attaching to the "memory of a summer out- 
ing will be not a little enhanced by association 
with the imperishable beauty of such works of 
literary art. There is a passage in one of Fitz- 
Gerald's letters which embodies the whole gospel 
of summer reading. He says : 

• I am now a good deal about in a new Boat I have 
built, and thought (as Johnson took Cocker's Arithmetic 
with him on travel, because he shouldn't exhaust it) so I 
would take Dante and Homer with me, instead of Mudie's 



Education 167 

Books, which I read through directly. I took Dante by- 
way of slow Digestion : not having looked at him for 
some years : but I am glad to find I relish him as much 
as ever : he atones with the Sea ; as you know does the 
Odyssey — these are the Men!* 

What shall we do, then, with what Mr. Rus- 
kin calls the good books of the hour — telling us 
that * we ought to be entirely thankful for them, 
and entirely ashamed or ourselves if we make no 
good use of them ' — if we are not to put them 
in our trunk when we start upon our vacation ? 
We have no disposition to underrate the useful- 
ness of c these bright accounts of travels, good- 
humored and witty discussions of questions, lively 
or pathetic story-telling in the form of novel, firm 
fact-telling by the real agents concerned in the 
events of passing history/ But we think that the 
time for them is the hour left us after a hard day's 
work, or the occasional holiday, rather than the 
summer's weeks or months of continuous rest. 
When that happy season comes round, we can 
put it to better uses, and, if we are going to do 
any reading at all, it surely offers the occasion of 
occasions for that close acquaintance with ' the 
authors ' that we can never hope to make during 



1 68 Little Leaders 

the ordinary routine of active life. If we are well- 
advised, we will leave the ephemeral and scrappy 
literature of the day for the day which brings it 
forth, and not allow it to usurp our attention dur- 
ing the only part of the year when we are really 
free to enter upon enjoyment of our great heritage 
of Books in the higher and better sense. ' Who 
would think of taking up the " Faerie Queene " 
for a stopgap ? ' while waiting for the sound of the 
dinner-bell, Lamb asks us. And, to point the 
obverse of the moral, let us in turn ask : Who 
would think, or who ought to think, of devoting 
the long summer days to books whose final cause 
is to supply us with stopgaps, and which, when 
put to other uses, are as much out of place as 
Spenser would be in the hungry half-hour pre- 
ceding the evening repast ? 



Education 169 



THE SUMMER SCHOOL. 

Observers of our educational activity cannot fail 
to have been impressed by the recent growth of 
the Summer School. The phase of educational 
work represented by that deserving institution at- 
tracts yearly more and more attention, and every 
recurrent summer season offers to the ambitious 
student a wider choice among places and subjects. 
In the earlier chapters of its history the outcome 
of private initiative, the organized forces of Amer- 
ican education soon perceived the possibilities of 
the Summer School as a supplementary educa- 
tional process, and now associate themselves un- 
equivocally with its work. The imposing lists 
of gatherings more or less educational in charac- 
ter, published year by year in various periodicals, 
give some idea of the dimensions to which the 
work has grown, and even these lists are rarely 
complete. ' More than one hundred Summer 
Schools,' we were told in the spring of 1895, 
c will be in active operation in the United States 



170 Little Leaders 

during the coming season.' Perhaps the best 
indication of the extent to which Summer Schools 
have become an accepted factor in our educa- 
tional work is afforded by the Report of the 
United States Commissioner of Education for 
1891—92, published by the Government Printing 
Office. For this Report, a special investigation 
of the subject of Summer Schools was made by 
Dr. W. W. Willoughby, and the results of that 
investigation may well be considered surprising 
even by those fairly familiar with the subject. 

Every new educational movement finds dis- 
senters, and there is involved in this growing util- 
ization of the summer months for educational 
purposes a fundamental principle that cannot be 
altogether ignored. There are some who will see 
in the movement merely another indication of 
that hurry and unrest so characteristic of Amer- 
ican life in its other phases, and who will claim 
that our summer vacations ought to be devoted 
to their primary purpose of relaxation and recre- 
ation. And there is no doubt that we need really 
to rest at times, to break the process of over- 
stimulation, to give our weary nerves an oppor- 
tunity to renew their dissipated energies. The 



Education 171 

best work is not, as a rule, done by those who toil 
for the greatest number of hours or days, but 
rather by those who so shape their lives as to 
maintain the working period at its highest potency. 
Yet it must not be forgotten, on the other hand, 
that the truest rest is not that of torpor or leth- 
argy, but is rather to be sought in variety of inter- 
est or aim. And the Summer School, carried on 
as it usually is among the mountains or by lake- 
side and seashore, means for the most of us so 
complete a change of environment that it may 
bring recuperation to the tired brain even although 
that brain persist in the moderate exercise of its 
habitual function. At all events, the objections 
of the dissenter are minimized, and need not be 
taken very seriously. Some sympathy may indeed 
be demanded for the officers and instructors of 
the Summer School, since to them, more nearly 
than to the average student, the work done is a 
continuation of the kind of work they have been 
doing all the rest of the year, and the sacrifices 
they are called upon to make are not inconsider- 
able. There is something wrong about a system 
which pretends that nine or ten r.-unths of work 
are enough for the teacher, yet which compen- 



172 Little Leaders 

sates him so inadequately for that work as to force 
him to eke out his income by working on for the 
two or three months remaining. As long as any 
large proportion of the instruction in our Sum- 
mer Schools is done by men thus compelled to do 
it, not only will the efficiency of the Summer 
School suffer, but the tone of the whole educa- 
tional profession will remain lower than it ought 
to be. 

Historically, the American Summer School be- 
gins with the establishment, in 1872, of the Zo- 
ological Laboratory on Penikese Island, under the 
direction of Louis Agassiz. That famous school, 
which had but two sessions, was the progenitor 
of the Chesapeake School of the Johns Hopkins 
University, the Schools at Annisquam, and 
Wood's Holl, and the school of the Brooklyn In- 
stitute on Long Island. These biological schools 
form a group by themselves, and no one can 
question the great importance of the work they 
have done in original research and the training of 
specialists. Allied to them are the schools form- 
ing the second group in Dr. Willoughby's class- 
ification, described as c Summer Schools giving 
instruction in single subjects/ Towards this 



Education 173 

group the Concord School of Philosophy, opened 
in 1879, occupies the historical relation of the 
Penikese Laboratory to the schools of the biolog- 
ical group. The Concord School had ten annual 
sessions, the last of them, in 1888, being limited 
to an Alcott memorial service. Of its several 
successors, the most direct, if we take both spirit 
and organization into account, is the school con- 
ducted by Mr. Thomas Davidson, for a few years 
at Farmington, Connecticut, afterwards and still 
at a secluded spot in Keene Valley, New York, 
beautifully situated in the heart of the Adiron- 
dacks. It is now called the Glenmore School, 
and is devoted to the culture sciences. The 
Plymouth School of Applied Ethics, inaugurated 
in 1 89 1, mainly through the efforts of Dr. Felix 
Adler, may also be considered here. It repre- 
sents the highest scientific plane yet reached by 
the schools of this group, and its field and influ- 
ence have broadened with every succeeding year 
of its existence. We have not space even to 
name the remaining schools devoted to special 
subjects, conspicuous among which are the many 
flourishing schools of music and the languages 
dotting the country from East to West. And 



174 Little Leaders 

we must also pass by without mention the count- 
less summer institutes and other schools for the 
training of teachers that are every year pursuing 
their silent but effective work of raising the stand- 
ard of the teaching profession in our country. 

The Chautauqua system, with its ever broad- 
ening scope and its countless ramifications, must 
have a paragraph to itself. It is estimated that 
more than one person in every hundred of our 
entire population visits the yearly gatherings of 
the various schools organized upon the Chautau- 
qua plan, if not directly controlled by its man- 
agement. The beginnings of this system are to 
be looked for only about a score of years back. 
In 1874 occurred the first summer meeting on 
the shores of Lake Chautauqua, planned by Mr. 
Lewis Miller and Dr. John H. Vincent. From 
this first meeting, attended by some six hundred 
students from all parts of the country, there has 
sprung the system of popular education whose 
name is now a household word throughout the 
land. The Chautauqua Assemblv proper pro- 
vides a great variety of courses in history, litera- 
ture, language, science, and pedagogics. The 
College of Liberal Arts, superadded in 1879, 



Education 175 

offers courses of a more exacting character, hav- 
ing much of the character of regular college work, 
and, like such work, leading to degrees that are 
not so lightly bestowed as some people imagine. 
Then there are the outlying Chautauqua assem- 
blies, a numerous progeny, held in attractive spots 
scattered all over the country. More than sixty 
of these assemblies attest the fertility of the fun- 
damental Chautauqua idea of combining instruc- 
tion with recreation. It is easy to scoff at the 
work of these assemblies, and to point out the 
obvious fact that they are in no sense substitutes 
for the colleges proper ; it is easy to visit any 
one of them, and have an eye for its vacation 
aspect alone ; it is easy, also, to talk about scrap- 
piness and superficiality ; but all comment of this 
sort is beside the mark. No one can take a close 
view of the Chautauqua work without recogniz- 
ing in it a very shrewd and practical application 
of possible means to a highly desirable end ; no 
one can take a broad view of the work without 
seeing that it is a factor of appreciable importance 
in our educational life. 

In conclusion, we must say a few words about 
the steadily increasing amount of summer work 



176 Little Leaders 

undertaken by the universities themselves, with 
the aid of their organization, equipment, and sci- 
entific methods. In a certain sense, the Penikese 
Laboratory of Agassiz should open this chapter of 
our history, for it was the evident utility of such 
an enterprise that led to the organization of the 
Harvard summer courses, which have, since 
1874, formed a regular department of the work 
of that University. Scientific subjects have 
mainly occupied these courses, and the work has 
been chiefly planned to meet the needs of teach- 
ers. These Harvard courses emphasize the im- 
portant principle that pedagogic instruction should 
not be purely theoretical, but should rather take 
up, although still with pedagogic intent, some 
concrete branch of knowledge, and, in teaching 
its substance, at the same time convey an ac- 
quaintance with the methods that its teachers 
should employ. The University of Virginia was 
also a pioneer in the work of Summer Schools, 
and its School of Law was started as early as 
1870, although it remained in an embryonic state 
until 1875. One institution after another has 
since fallen into line, and summer work is now 
done at Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and 



Education 177 

many of the State Universities of the West. The 
University Extension movement is also taking 
possession of the summer field, and such a pro- 
gramme as that offered for the summer of 1895 
at the University of Pennsylvania is really extra- 
ordinary in its scope and interest. It remained, 
however, for the new University of Chicago first 
to occupy the position that the summer months 
are just as good as any others for full university 
work in all departments, and first to offer the 
example of a great institution of learning open to 
students from one end of the year to the other. 
The results of this undertaking all go to show 
that President Harper had reason to attach great 
importance to this unprecedented feature of the 
University planned by him. At a single bound 
this new educational departure passed from the 
experimental stage to the stage of successfully 
accomplished fact, and summer education entered 
upon the most serious phase that it has yet known 
in this country. 



1 78 Little Leaders 



AN ENDOWED NEWSPAPER. 

In the retrospect of recent years there is no fea- 
ture more significant than that offered by the 
benefactions of the philanthropically - minded 
wealthy. The immense sums of money devoted, 
whether by bequests or by gifts inter vivos, to 
charitable and educational purposes, give pause 
to cynicism and blunt the weapons of the socialist. 
There is some good in human nature, after all, 
and great fortunes are not an unmitigated social 
evil. The wealth thus diverted to beneficent ends 
may not always have been well-gotten, but its 
application, at least, is praiseworthy, and the act 
of its bestowal is a positive boon to societv. We 
do not say that this atones for any possible dis- 
honesty of acquisition ; we do sav that such be- 
stowal may legitimately be considered as an iso- 
lated fact, and judged upon its own merits. Ex- 
isting wealth, however acquired, is a positive 
power for good or evil ; even if unfairly gained 
by its present owner, it is there, and must be reck- 



Education 179 

oned with as a social factor. There are few cases 
in which an attempt to undo the injustice of the 
past, as far as injured individuals are concerned, 
would not be entirely futile. Had the late Jay 
Gould devised his estate to public purposes, it 
would have been ethical casuistry to frown upon 
the gift. If we may make this somewhat pre- 
posterous supposition, it cannot be denied that 
mankind would have been better off in conse- 
quence ; nor can it be denied, on the other hand, 
that mankind would have been still better off had 
no such person lived. The benefaction and the 
personal account of the man who makes it pre- 
sent two distinct questions, which ought not to 
be, as they so often are, confused. It does not 
detract from the positive value of the one that 
the other leans heavily to the debit side of the 
balance. 

This excursus has led us away from the orig- 
inal intention of our article, which was simply 
that of indicating a new outlet for the wealth of 
the philanthropist. We imagine that many a 
millionaire, disposed to liberality, has been de- 
terred by lack of the imagination needed in the 
selection of a suitable object. To endow a church, 



180 Little Leaders 

or a hospital, or a college, must seem a hackneyed 
procedure, worthy as such institutions intrinsically 
are. To the millionaire of philanthropic velleity, 
in search of some comparatively novel method of 
benefitting his fellow-men, we would suggest the 
endowment of a newspaper. We can hardly con- 
ceive of a more civilizing influence than might be 
exerted, over a city and country, by a daily news- 
paper of ideal standards and aims, a newspaper 
dependent for support upon no political organiza- 
tion, no special group of commercial and indus- 
trial interests, no popular favor of any kind. 

It may be taken for granted, in the present 
state of civilization, that no such daily newspa- 
per would be likely to pay its own expenses. It is 
an admitted fact that the best intellectual or artis- 
tic activity needs to be supported. There are 
few exceptions to the rule that the best education, 
the best literature, the best scientific work, the 
best painting, sculpture, music, and dramatic art, 
cannot reward their producers as they should be 
rewarded. Architecture alone, among the higher 
works of the intellect, makes sufficient appeal to 
the practical instincts of men to be reasonably 
fruitful, and even the very best architecture must 



Education 181 

be done for glory rather than for pecuniary return. 
Still, in all these cases (dramatic art excepted), 
fame continues to supply the motive for good 
work, perhaps the best work that might in any case 
be hoped for. But the desire for fame alone, and 
the consciousness of doing work as it should be 
done, without thought of material profit, does not 
seem as yet to have been a motive sufficient for 
the production of anything like an ideal news- 
paper. At best, when the production is controlled 
by a single mind of sound instincts, the motive is 
mixed with more or less of commercialism; at 
worst, when the management is by a corporation, 
the money-getting motive is unleavened by any- 
thing better, and a newspaper is produced which 
has for its one object the enlargement of circula- 
tion by any means that do not overstep the limits 
imposed by the criminal law. That journalism has 
its ethics, that its exercise is a trust no less than 
the exercise of the legal, or medical, or teaching 
profession, or of the functions of public life, is a 
fact almost lost sight of in our modern scramble 
for wealth. How hopelessly blunted must be the 
moral sense of a man who can assume the office 
of a public teacher, in the wide sense permitted 



1 82 Little Leaders 

by journalism, with the deliberate intention of 
making it bring the largest possible returns, and 
who can unblushingly defend his course by plead- 
ing that the production of a newspaper is a busi- 
ness enterprise like any other. 

The prevalence of this unethical spirit has 
produced the American newspaper of to-day, for 
which every intelligent American must blush. 
That certain features of excellence, mainly in the 
direction of prompt and comprehensive news- 
gathering, have been developed, is to be attributed 
rather to accident than to meritorious impulse. 
The American newspaper publisher has discov- 
ered that he can get rich by catering to the tastes 
of the vulgar, and vicious, and unlettered, and 
so snaps his fingers at clergymen, and teachers, 
and c literary fellows ' generally. Granting the 
immoral postulate from which he sets out, his 
course follows logically enough. The chief of 
our cities illustrates the two extremes of modern 
journalism, and the argument is commercially 
convincing. The best newspaper in the United 
States is published there, and also the worst ; the 
circulation of each being inversely as its desert. 

For this state of things public taste, consider- 



Education 183 

ing only the verdict of numbers, is of course re- 
sponsible, and offers a certain excuse for the pol- 
icy of not setting too high a standard at once. 
What it does not excuse is the policy of arousing 
in humanity the dormant vulgarities and brutali- 
ties that civilization is slowly endeavoring to put 
to their final sleep, but that are still restless and 
wakeful. Many of our newspapers are engaged 
in this work of positive degradation, and for their 
diabolical activity no condemnation can be too 
emphatic. To the others, more or less self- 
convicted of time-serving, but still standing upon 
a mental plane slightly above that of the homme 
sensuel moyen, there is some faint praise to be given, 
at least of the sort that we give to the man who 
finds a pocket-book that he might keep unde- 
tected, and who restores it to the owner. It is, 
of course, only the barest decency to refrain from 
employing the worst methods of our worst jour- 
nalism, but it is something to save even that rel- 
ative form of virtue from the general wreck of 
worthy ideals. 

It is because of these considerations ; because 
most of our newspapers slight the real inter- 
ests of civilized society for the sake of parti- 



184 Little Leaders 

sanship, vulgar personalities, and subjects that no 
healthy mind needs or cares to know very much 
about ; because, in the words of the late Mr. Low- 
ell, the press of the day 4 is controlled more than 
ever before by its interests as a business rather 
than by its sense of duty as a teacher, and must 
purvey news instead of intelligence ' ; because, 
to sum it all up, the influence of such a press 
upon the national character must be incalculably 
bad, that we have made our serious suggestion 
to the ambitious millionaire. As an object- 
lesson in journalism, the existence in a commun- 
ity like New York or Chicago of a paper devoted 
to the real interests of the city and nation of its 
origin, uncontrolled by counting-room influences, 
able to keep its readers in touch with the best 
thought of the world, giving to art and science and 
literature their due prominence in its columns, 
unflinchingly standing for honest government and 
the purity of private morals, — the very existence 
of such a paper would mean much, although its 
readers should be outnumbered ten to one by 
those of lewd sheets of the baser sort. It could 
not fail in time to react upon the journalism of 
the country at large, and would offer a standing 



In Memoriam 185 

protest against the methods now current. It 
would steadily find its way into the family, and 
prove a potent influence in shaping the men and 
women of the future. Indeed, the most serious 
aspect of the present problem is that offered by 
the influence of newspapers upon the young. 
Upon this aspect the New York c Evening Post * 
puts no undue emphasis when it says : ' The ris- 
ing curiosity, which is in young people the most 
important instrument of mental growth, is not 
only turned wholly away from the serious and 
healthy side of American life, from sound politics, 
from wholesome literature, from art, science, in- 
dustry, but is concentrated with hideous eager- 
ness on the national sewers and pesthouses and 
dungheaps, until the whole of life becomes a 
filthy jest.' The endowment of a great news- 
paper, with suitable provision for its management 
by a body of highly educated, cultivated, and con- 
scientious men, would prove a work of wider- 
reaching beneficence than the endowment of a 
great university. 



IN MEMORIAM 



CONSERVATION. 

Aber der Erdgeist wiirde lacheln und sagen : « Die 
Quelle, aus der die Individuen und ihre Krafte fliessen, 
ist unerschopflich und unendlich wie Zeit und Raum : 
denn jene sind, eben wie diese, Formen aller Erscheinung, 
Sichtbarkeit des Willens. Jene unendliche Quelle kann 
kein endliches Maass erschopfen : daher steht jeder im 
Keime erstickten Begebenheit, oder Werk, zur Wieder- 
kehr noch immer die unverminderte Unendlichkeit often. 
In dieser Welt der Erscheinung ist so wenig wahrer Ver- 
lust als wahrer Gewinn moglich.'' 

— Schopenhauer •, W.a.W.u.V., III., jj. 

They pass away beyond the horizon's bourne 
That dimly rings us round ; from out our view 
They vanish, starlike souls, nor any clue 

Remains to track their orbits, and we mourn. 

Life, once so fair, now of their glory shorn, 
Unbeaconed by their light, grows dark of hue, 
And sullen now the vault that erst was blue 

Lowers, its radiance and its grace outworn. 

Yet at our grief the Spirit of the Earth 

But smiles, saying : 'To me are death and birth 

One thing ; I dwell not in the world of space 

And time ; my power is boundless to replace 

What I destroy ; then fear not any dearth 

Of stout torch-bearers in the soul's swift race.' 



ALFRED TENNYSON. 

In the most memorable words ever written by a 
poet upon the subject of his art, Marlowe speaks 
of the unattainable ideal that still hovers before 
the poet's vision, whatever the beauty he may 
have succeeded in fixing upon the page, of the 
' One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest/ 

By the critic, no less than the poet, this difficulty 
is felt when he seeks to digest into words the 
varied thoughts and emotions that have resulted 
from years of communion with the spirit of some 
great master of literature, when he endeavors to 
gather into the focus of concise expression all the 
wonder and the love, all the gratitude and the 
reverence, that have grown with the years, with 
the renewed study of familiar works, and with 
the fresh joy of acquaintance with new ones. 
But the delight that there is in praising (to use 
Landor's phrase), however inadequate the utter- 
ance, and the desire to bear some sort of witness 



190 Little Leaders 

to a spiritual influence that has chastened the 
passions and ennobled the ideals, often impels to 
speech where silence might be the fitter tribute. 
It would indeed be difficult within these, or 
any reasonable limits, adequately to express Ten- 
nyson's claim upon the grateful remembrance of 
his fellow men, or to estimate, in other than the 
most general terms, the magnitude of the loss that 
has made this one of the most fatal months of the 
century. That he was the greatest English poet 
of his age is a fact so beyond the reach of cavil 
that it seems hardly worth taking the trouble to 
state. In the whole of English literature there 
are but the names of Shakespeare and Milton and 
Shelley worthy to be mentioned with his, and 
the literature of the world can add but few others 
to the list of such immortals. Tennyson was 
much more than the poet of the Victorian era, 
just as Virgil was far more than the poet of the 
Augustan age. The Englishman, like the Roman, 
was one of the few supreme masters of poetic 
expression, and in that fact is the assurance of 
an influence equally enduring. We may freely 
admit that he did not, like Pindar, soar to the 
empyrean, nor, like Dante, put upon record an 



In Memoriam 191 

age of human history ; that he did not, like 
Shakespeare, sound all the depths of the soul, 
nor, like Hugo, control both the thunders and 
the lightnings. We may admit all this, but it 
still remains true that he gave a faultless expres- 
sion to a wide range of noble thoughts ; and no 
higher praise is known to literary criticism. 

In the astonishing vitality of his genius, Ten- 
nyson stands alone among our great poets. From 
the publication of the volume of 1842 to this 
very year of his death — a full half-century — no 
other poetic force acting in our literature has 
been comparable to his. The work of his old 
age does not suffer in comparison with the work 
of his earlier years ; we cannot point to any par- 
ticular period of his life and say that he was then 
at his prime. The poet of the second " Locks- 
ley Hall " was as truly at his prime as the poet 
of the first. Indeed, there is about some of the 
late poems a beauty that seems almost unearthly, 
the evidence of a prophetic vision clarified by 
age, and placing him not only with the artists but 
with the seers. That 'Vision of the World* 
dimly revealed to his youth took ever with the 
advancing years an outline more defined, and his 



192 Little Leaders 

gaze penetrated more and more deeply into the 
heart of the universe. 

* Upon me flashed 
The power of prophesying,* 

sings his own Tiresias, and we cannot refrain 
from finding a personal utterance in the phrase, 
as well as in this other : 

* But for me, 
I would that I were gathered to my rest, 
And mingled with the famous kings of old, 
On whom about their ocean-islands flash 
The faces of the Gods.' 

The prayer has now been granted him ; yet at 
this time of parting, 

« When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home,' 

we cannot quite control our sorrow, or refrain 
from feeling that l sadness of farewell ' which he 
expressly urged should have no place in our hearts. 
The sense of loss is too recent and too great. In 
the calmer after-days, perhaps, we may remember 

that 

1 Men must endure 
Their going hence even as their coming hither,* 

we may acquiesce in the view that ' ripeness is 
all,' and that Tennyson was ripe for death as few 



In Memoriam 193 

men ever are ; we may take heart again when 
we think that 

The song that helped our father's souls to live, 
And bids the waning century bloom anew,* 

is ours forever in all its imperishable beauty. 

And how wonderfully rich and varied is the 
legacy that Tennyson has left us ! Let us indi- 
cate a few of its more salient characteristics, — 
remembering all the while that in whatever aspect 
we view the poems, they constitute as a whole 
the most highly-finished body of work of like 
volume in our literature. In dealing with the 
facts of external nature, they show a minuteness 
and a delicacy of observation that cannot receive 
sufficient praise. Tennyson's skies and winds 
and seas, his mountains and fields, his trees and 
rocks, his birds and flowers, are described with 
unerring accuracy of sound and color and season. 
It has been the experience of many a reader of 
Tennyson to come upon some descriptive verse 
that has seemed at variance with ordinary observ- 
ation, and afterwards to see exactly that aspect 
of nature revealed in fact. Mr. Swinburne offers 
an illustration of this experience. He is speak- 
ing of a verse of c Elaine,' 



194 Little Leaders 

' And white sails flying on the yellow sea/ 
and says : 

« I could not but feel conscious at once of its charm, 
and of the equally certain fact that I, though cradled and 
reared beside the sea, had never seen anything like that. 
But on the first bright day I ever spent on the eastern 
coast of England I saw the truth of this touch at once, 
and recognized once more with admiring delight the sub- 
tle and sure fidelity of that happy and studious hand. 
There, on the dull yellow foamless floor of dense discol- 
ored sea, so thick with clotted sand that the water looked 
massive and solid as the shore, the white sails flashed 
whiter against it and along it as they fled : and I knev/ 
once more the truth of what I had never doubted — that 
the eye and the hand of Tennyson may always be trusted, 
at once and alike, to see and to express the truth.' 

Tennyson's intimate familiarity with the best 
literature of the world is conspicuous in his work, 
yet an uncritical reader gets but an imperfect idea 
of the poet's range among the classics of the past. 
So entirely has he made his own the thought of 
his predecessors, so complete has been the pro- 
cess of assimilation, that it would require a closer 
analytical study than has yet been made to indi- 
cate, with any kind of fulness, his indebtedness 
to others. And, of course, indebtedness in this 
sense ceases to be a real obligation, for it has 



In Memoriam 195 

always been the prerogative of genius to restate, 
in fresh and beautiful forms of expression, the 
world's older thought, thus giving it renewed cur- 
rency and force. The work of illustrating this 
phase of Tennyson's genius is still to be accom- 
plished, and will call for so rare a combination of 
scholarship and sympathetic insight that it may 
long remain undone. In a fragmentary way, it 
has been attempted, with provisional success, by 
a number of writers. Mr. Van Dyke's studies 
of c Milton and Tennyson ' and c The Bible in 
Tennyson ' are efforts in this direction. In the 
latter of these studies we read : ' The poet owes 
a large debt to the Christian Scriptures, not only 
for their formative influence upon his mind and 
for the purely literary material in the way of illus- 
trations and allusions which they have given him, 
but also, and more particularly, for the creation 
of a moral atmosphere, a medium of thought and 
feeling, in which he can speak freely and with 
assurance of sympathy to a very wide circle of 
readers.' Mr. Van Dyke illustrates this thesis 
by many examples. Of Tennyson's debt to the 
Greek and Latin classics, much yet remains to 
be said. Such brief poems as the verses l To 



196 Little Leaders 

Virgil/ or the ' Frater Ave atque Vale,' inscribed 
to Catullus, might almost be made the subject of 
separate studies; and none but a profound scholar 
could unravel the close texture of the c Lucretius,* 
and indicate the inspiration of its every phrase. 
Upon the idyllic side of his genius, Mr. Stedman 
has made a careful study of the relations between 
Tennyson and Theocritus, possibly attaching too 
much importance to this aspect of the English 
poet, yet doing his work with insight and thorough- 
ness. But the study of what we may call Ten- 
nyson's allusiveness, or better, perhaps, his liter- 
ary ancestry, has possibilities that are practically 
inexhaustible, and we may as well leave the sub- 
ject at this point. 

A word remains to be said of Tennyson's so- 
cial and ethical ideals, of his philosophy of life. 
It has been too much the fashion to speak of him 
as merely reflecting the temper of the Victorian 
epoch. That he has done this is true enough, 
but it is also true that he has done much more 
than this. His outlook (at least since the ' In 
Memoriam' period) has extended far beyond the 
limits of his age, and has grown wider and wider 
with the advancing years. 



In Memoriam 197 

♦What hast thou done for me, grim Old Age, save 
breaking my bones on the rack ? * 

he asks in his latest volume of verse ; and his an- 
swer is ready : 

• I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a 
field in the Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs 
of a low desire, 
But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet 
at last 
As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse 
of a height that is higher. " 

The matter of his song is that which poetry has 
found fit in all ages, and the song reflects, not 
merely the aspirations of a race, but those of all 
mankind. The domestic affections and the sanc- 
tity of the home, a patriotism not narrowed into 
selfish disregard of other nations, and a religious 
feeling too broad to be fettered by any creeds, and 
too profound to be agitated by the surface cur- 
rents of thought, — these are some of his themes. 
A conservative of the finest type, he was no re- 
actionary, set upon barring the steps of progress. 
A champion of the existing order only as that 
order embodies the hard-earned fruits of the long 
struggle for light and justice, which is England's 



198 Little Leaders 

proudest title to a place in the foremost page of 
history, his eye was ever keen to perceive c the 
vision of the world and all the wonder that should 
be,' and his mind ever alert in recognition of the 
fact that always, in any age not hopelessly stag- 
nant, c the old order changeth, yielding place to 
new.' The liberty which is not license, and the 
reasonable orderliness of life which accepts law 
without chafing, and which is alone made really 
possible by its acceptance of law — ' acting the 
law we live by without fear,' — this is the social 
ideal which he has persistently proclaimed for 
more than half a century. The lesson of l Love 
and Duty,' that l all life needs for life is possible 
to will,' and the lesson of the Wellington ode, — 
* Not once or twice in our fair island-story, 
The path of duty was the way to glory : 
He, that ever following her commands, 
On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 
His path upward, and prevail' d, 
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
Are close upon the shining table-lands 
To which our God Himself is moon and sun,' — 

are repeated again and again in his work, until we 
find them in c Locksley Hall Sixty Years After' : 



In Memoriam 199 

« Follow you the Star that lights a desert pathway, yours 
or mine; 
Forward till you see the highest Human Nature is divine. 

♦Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half 

control his doom — 
Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant 

tomb/ 
The picture of the poet's last hour will long re- 
main engraved upon our memory. The midnight 
time, the full harvest moon streaming in over the 
Surrey hills and flooding the chamber with light, 
the august head, the features calm save for lips 
that murmured — what other words so fit ? — 
* Fear no more the heat o* the sun, 

Nor the furious winter's rages,* — 
the faces of the mourners stricken with grief and 
awe as that great soul faded ' into the unknown,' 
— nothing could have been more impressive ; 
nothing could have added to the solemn pathos 
of the scene. c Quiet consummation have ' was 
doubtless the unspoken prayer of those who loved 
him best ; of the other verse — c And renowned 
be thy grave ' — thought need hardly have been 
taken ; for England could offer nothing less to the 
poet so lately the greatest of her living sons, than 
a place beneath the arches of Westminster Abbey. 



200 Little Leaders 



ERNEST RENAN. 

While the mortal remains of Tennyson found 
their final resting-place in the abode of England's 
mighty dead, the remains of Renan, provisionally 
interred in Montmartre, were but awaiting the 
necessary legislative action to be carried in state to 
the Pantheon. It was a singular fatality that sim- 
ultaneously plunged both England and France 
into mourning, each for the greatest of its recent 
writers. For the position of Renan as the first 
Frenchman of letters after the death of Hugo was 
incontestable. And yet how different the paths 
by which the Frenchman and the Englishman 
attained immortality ! The one addressed the 
world solely in verse; the other, exclusively in 
prose. The one reached truth by the intuitive 
processes of the poet; the other, by the minute 
and laborious investigations of the man of science. 
This, at least, is what the visible work of the two 
men reveals, yet perhaps the difference is not so 
great as it seems : perhaps it is to be largely ex- 



In Memoriam 201 

plained by the fact that one chose to record both 
the operations and the results, while the other 
gave expression to the results only. 

In Renan we see exemplified the highest type 
of the modern critical spirit, yet his work pre- 
sents at the same time that nice balance of emo- 
tion and intellect too often destroyed by erudition. 
With him, neither history nor philosophy was 
allowed to grow arid, for the springs of feeling 
never ran dry. It is this that has given him a 
hold upon contemporary thought unshared by 
others of equal scholarship. He found the world 
of men intensely interesting, and he contrived to 
make his readers share the interest, however 
seemingly forbidding the gateway by which he 
approached the study of human affairs. It was 
by the gateway of philology that he chose to 
make the approach; but the philologist, in his 
view, must also be linguist, historian, archaeolo- 
gist, artist, and philosopher. Upon a foundation 
of the minutest and most conscientious study of 
philological details he built up the history of the 
past, and made it real to us because of the un- 
failing sympathies that went with the work, and 
because c le vif sentiment des epoques et des 



202 Little Leaders 

races,' the possession of which he attributed to 
Thierry, was at least equally his own. 

The history, and especially the religious his- 
tory, of primitive peoples was the principal sub- 
ject of his study, and the great work to which 
most of his life was given was a history of the 
origins of Christianity, supplemented by a history 
of the people of Israel. This work he lived to 
complete in both parts ; the first, in seven vol- 
umes, was finished many years ago ; of the sec- 
ond, three volumes had appeared at the time of 
his death, and the remainder was ready for pub- 
lication. We see, even in our own day, how 
much clerical antagonism is aroused by the scien- 
tific study of the history of Christianity ; but the 
feeling excited thirty years ago, when the first 
part of Renan's great work was published, was far 
more general and more bitter than anything that 
has been witnessed of late. That first part was 
the famous ' Vie de Jesus,' a book having some 
slight faults of taste, but on the whole so beau- 
tiful and so reverent that we can only wonder at 
the bigotry which assailed it. ' Why do we write 
the life of the gods if not to make men love the 
divine that was in them, and to show that this 



In Memoriam 203 

divine lives yet and will ever live in the heart of 
humanity ? ' But clericalism was a force that 
had to be reckoned with in the France of 1863. 
It was only the year before, that, for a reference 
to Jesus of almost Apostolic reverence, contained 
in Renan's opening lecture as professor of Semi- 
tic languages at the College de France, his lec- 
ture-room had been closed by the government, 
to remain so, as far as Renan was concerned, for 
no less than seventeen years. 

The religious intolerance that assailed Renan 
during the years of his early fame has not yet 
wholly subsided, although it has adopted of late 
more covert modes of attack, seeking to weaken 
his influence by discrediting his reputation as a 
scholar, or, exaggerating the sentimental side of 
his character, to suggest that he is not to be taken 
very seriously in anything. Matthew Arnold was, 
and is still, attacked in a very similar way by En- 
glish orthodoxy, and, although his scholarship was 
not comparable with that of Renan, he was as 
clearly in the right upon all the essentials of the 
discussion. Both men possessed the art of being 
playfully serious ; both had shafts of the keenest 
irony at their command ; and both contrived to 



204 Little Leaders 

produce in their heavier-witted assailants the same 
sort of exasperation. Yet readers of c Literature 
and Dogma ' and l God and the Bible ' do not 
need to be reminded of how wholly Arnold's 
influence was exerted in favor of the religious 
temper and of genuine religious belief. How 
eloquently Renan has acted as the spokesman of 
religious feeling may be illustrated by many pas- 
sages. He has the Voltairean weapons at his 
command, but he does not turn them against re- 
ligious beliefs. c Voltaire makes sport of the 
Bible,' he says, c because he has no comprehen- 
sion of the primitive productions of the human 
mind. He would have made sport of the Vedas 
as well, and should have made sport of Homer.' 
It is precisely the possession of the historic sense 
that gives to Renan's treatment of religion a seri- 
ousness that no one would now dream of attach- 
ing to Voltaire's. Here, for example, is a brief 
but weighty statement upon this subject : 

' False when they seek to demonstrate the infinite, or 
to give it bounds, or to make it incarnate, if I may use 
the expression, religions are true when they affirm it. 
The gravest errors mingled by them with that affirmation 
count for nothing in comparison with the importance of 
the truth which they proclaim.' 



In Memoriam 205 

And the following passage gives condensed ex- 
pression to the whole of Renan's religious teach- 
ing: 

' I have thought to serve religion by transporting it to 
the region of the unassailable, away from special dogmas 
and supernatural beliefs. When these crumble away re- 
ligion must not crumble with them, and perhaps the day 
will come when those who reproach me, as for a crime, 
with making this distinction between the imperishable 
basis of religion and its transient forms will be glad to 
take refuge from brutal attacks within the very shelter 
that they have scorned. "" 

Like all men in whose psychical organization 
feeling has its full share, Renan was a man of 
moods, although not to so pronounced an extent 
as Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. Like those English 
contemporaries a teacher in the highest sense of 
the term, he is also like them in the fact that his 
teaching does not present absolute consistency. 
Then the constant necessity of assuming points 
of view other than his own, forced upon him by 
the study of those primitive peoples to whose life 
and thought he gave the largest share of his atten- 
tion, developed in him a certain form of the dra- 
matic instinct, evidences of which may be found 
in his historical work no less than in the philo- 



206 Little Leaders 

sophical dramas of his later years. Both the facts 
above noted have been fruitful in misunderstand- 
ings, to say nothing of those other misunder- 
standings that always result from a dulness of 
perception in matters of the most refined literary 
art. To seize the exact shade of meaning is often 
essential to any sort of comprehension of Renan's 
work, and his irony is at times so delicate that a 
dull reader will often take it for sober earnest. It 
has been stated more than once, for example, that 
the tendency of Renan's teaching is towards a 
material and even sensual view of life. To one 
who has really penetrated his meaning and caught 
the essential spirit of his work as a whole, no 
judgment could be more grotesquely false than 
this. We have mentioned Carlyle, and in one 
point Renan's philosophy of life comes close to 
that of the Sage of Chelsea. What is the object 
of life ? what its inmost purpose ? Both men ask 
these questions again and again, and the answers 
of both are not dissimilar. Carlyle tells us many 
times that we have no right to happiness ; that 
something far higher — namely, blessedness — 
should be the goal of our endeavor. When Renan 
exclaims, c II ne s'agit pas d'etre heureux, il s'agit 



In Memoriam 207 

d'etre parfait,' what is this but the same doctrine ? 
Material well-being is indeed with most men a 
necessary condition for the realization of their 
higher selves, but it must never be taken as an 
end. Material ameliorations of the human lot 
4 have no ideal value in themselves, but they are 
the conditions of human dignity and the progress 
of the individual towards perfection.' Again he 
says : c The wisdom of Poor Richard has always 
seemed to me a poor enough sort of wisdom.' 
Such a conception of life is simply immoral. 
c What matters it to have realized, at the close 
of this brief life, a more or less complete type of 
external felicity ? What really matters is to have 
thought much and loved much, to have looked 
with steadfast gaze upon all things, to dare criti- 
cise death itself in the dying hour.' And then, 
in one of those eloquent passages of which Renan 
was as great a master as ever put pen to paper, 
and that appeal so powerfully to the intellect be- 
cause they enlist the emotions upon their side, he 
breaks into this beautiful rhapsody : 

« Heroes of the unselfish life, saints, apostles, recluses, 
cenobites, ascetics of all ages, sublime poets and philoso- 
phers whose delight was in having no heritage here below j 



208 Little Leaders 

sages who went through life with the left eye fixed upon 
earth and the right eye upon heaven j and thou above all, 
divine Spinoza, who chosest to remain poor and forgotten 
the better to serve thy thought and adore the Infinite, how 
much better you understood life than those who take it 
to be a narrow problem in self-interest, the meaningless 
struggle of ambition or of vanity ! It had doubtless been 
better to make your God less of an abstraction, not set 
upon heights so dim that to contemplate him strained 
the vision. God is not alone in the sky, he is near each 
one of us j he is in the flower pressed by your feet, in the 
balmy air, in the life that hums and murmurs all about, 
most of all in your hearts. Yet in your sublime exalta- 
tion how much more clearly do I discern the super-sensual 
needs and instincts of humanity, than in those colorless 
beings upon whom the ray of the ideal never flashed, and 
whose lives from their first day to their last, were un- 
folded, precise and trim, like the leaves of a book of ac- 
counts!* 



In Memoriam 209 



HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. 

The death of Taine took from the world a 
writer clearly the foremost among Frenchmen of 
letters after the loss of Renan. There are some, 
indeed, who would have claimed for him the 
highest place even during the lifetime of the great 
philologist and religious historian. For excel- 
lence of style, all would probably have conceded 
to Renan a higher place than to Taine, but for 
knowledge, for industry, for the orderly marshall- 
ing of facts, and for the exercise of a profound 
influence upon the thought of his age, one might 
have claimed with much show of reason that the 
author of ' Les Origines de la France Contem- 
poraiiie ' was of like stature with the author of 
4 L'Histoire des Origines du Christianisme. , Both 
men were brilliant exemplars of the scientific 
method in historical criticism, and both were sin- 
gularly free from the spirit of provincialism that 
has characterized, in a notable degree, so many of 
the best French writers. In the work of the one 



210 Little Leaders 

as of the other, there is no more striking feature 
than its generous recognition of foreign, especially 
German, scholarship; than its catholic outlook 
upon the world of thinkers, and its readiness to 
accept the best that was offered, holding the Re- 
public of the intellect to be an organization of 
more real and enduring significance that any 
political or racial group of the forces that make 
for solidarity among men. 

As regards versatility, while it is possibly un- 
fair to say that Taine had a wider range than 
Renan, it is still true that his activity found ex- 
pression in a greater variety of forms. History, 
literature, philosophy, and art had in him an inter- 
preter of insight and sagacity. In each of these 
fields he showed himself a master, and made 
important contributions to thought. We might 
almost mention travel as a fifth among these, for 
he was one of the keenest of observers, and the 
records of his sojourn in England, in Italy, and 
in the Pyrenees, belong to the small class of books 
of travel really instructive and of permanent value. 
That he kept active, even when at home, the 
faculty of the thoughtful traveller, is made evi- 
dent by his c Notes sur Paris.' In this book, dis- 



In Memoriam 211 

guised under the name of a certain M. Grain- 
dorge, he illustrated anew the objectivity of his 
critical standpoint, and earned for himself a grati- 
tude not altogether unmixed. 

The various manifestations of Renan's activity 
had philology for a starting-point, and his work 
was thus given the unity that comes from a fun- 
damental subject common to its separate parts. 
c The true philologist,' he said, ' must be linguist, 
historian, archaeologist, artist, and philosopher at 
once/ The unity of Taine's work, on the other 
hand, is based upon method rather than upon sub- 
ject. Few writers have ever developed so early, 
and kept so consistently in view, a distinctive 
method of critical investigation. His life-work 
was an endeavor to establish criticism upon a sci- 
entific basis, to provide it with axioms and pos- 
tulates, to give it a certainty approximating to that 
of a mathematical demonstration. This endeavor 
was never absent from his work, whether it was 
engaged with ancient historians or modern phil- 
osophers, with Italian art or English literature, 
with the French life of to-day or the French life 
of the Revolutionary epoch. Taine's critical 
method has excited much controversy, and few 



212 Little Leaders 

have been willing to give it acceptance in its en- 
tirety. In its application, it broke down more 
than once, yet its fruitfulness is no less evident 
than the fact that it could not accomplish all that 
its author claimed. The tendency of modern 
criticism is unquestionably towards a scientific 
method ; in history and philosophy it has already 
reached such a basis ; that in art and literature it 
will eventually come to such a basis we may 
hardly doubt. Taine's work, whatever its short- 
comings, moved with the main current of pro- 
gress, and quickened that current in its flow. 

Taine's work in art criticism is mainly con- 
tained in the five small volumes that were the 
immediate fruit of his professorship at the Paris 
1 Ecole des Beaux-Arts.' These books are deli- 
cate in style and penetrating in thought. They 
treat art, not as a matter of technique, but as a 
factor in the history of culture. The c Voyage 
en Italie ' also has many passages of the subtlest 
sort of art criticism. In philosophy, Taine made 
his debut with a work upon c Les Philosophes 
du XlXme Siecle en France,' an attack upon 
the Philosophieprofessoren that must have delighted 
Schopenhauer, if he chanced to read it. The 









In Memoriam 213 

impersonal subject of Taine's attack was eclecti- 
cism, the philosophical method — if we may call 
it a method — aptly described by one of Taine's 
biographers as c that rhetorical spiritualism which 
in the eyes of the authorities had the advantage 
of giving no umbrage to the clergy, in the eyes 
of thinkers the disadvantage of tripping airily over 
the difficulties which it undertook to clear up and 
do away with, or else of evading them altogether.' 
Personally the attack was mainly upon Cousin, 
the leader of the eclectics, who took his revenge, 
some years later, by successfully opposing the 
bestowal of a special Academy prize upon the 
famous c Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise.' 
Taine's principal philosophical work was his 
treatise c De ^Intelligence/ characterized by him- 
self as ' Pouvrage auquel on a le plus reflechi,' 
and published at a much later date than the one 
previously described. Although a quarter-cen- 
tury has elapsed since the work was written, and 
although the period has been one of remarkable 
activity in experimental psychology and philo- 
sophical criticism, the book remains one of the 
best and most instructive discussions of the sub- 
jects that we possess. Taine's philosophical 



214 Little Leaders 

standpoint is often stated as that of a follower of 
Hegel and Spinoza, but he has himself stated 
that his special indebtedness is rather to Mon- 
tesquieu and Condillac. 

It is in his treatment of literature that the pe- 
culiarities of Taine's critical method become most 
apparent. His first publication of any import- 
ance was a work on ' Lafontaine et Ses Fables,' 
and in this book we find fully developed his the- 
ory of race and environment as the essentially 
determining factors in literary production. In the 
' Essai sur Tite-Live ' these principles of criti 
cism were applied a second time. They found 
their most thorough -going exemplification in 
' L'Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise,' and the 
opposition they encountered has mainly taken this 
work as the objective point of attack. When 
Ste.-Beuve suggested that the work should have 
been called ' L'Histoire de la Race et de la Civ- 
ilization Anglaises par la Litterature ' he gave a 
succinct description of Taine's method. That 
method consists, when applied to the study of a 
whole literature, in analyzing the conditions of 
soil and climate under which the literature was 
produced, the prevalent political and social con- 



In Memoriam 215 

ditions that attended its development, and the 
ideal tendencies of the race that gave it birth. 
The method, in its application to the individual, 
takes further account of his special circumstances, 
of his ancestry, his place of birth, and his educa- 
tion, and of the particular tendencies of the age 
into which he was born. The whole, or nearly 
the whole, problem is one of heredity and envir- 
onment; individuality, in the sense of spontaneous 
or incalculable manifestations of power, finds little 
place in this scientific system ; genius, in what- 
ever spiritual isolation it may seem to appear, is 
really the necessary product of forces whose origin 
we may trace and whose effects we may deter- 
mine with considerable accuracy. This theory 
of literature, we need hardly say, has not met 
with general acceptance, in spite of the life-long 
advocacy given it by Taine. The persistence, 
the learning, and the eloquence with which he 
defended it have not proved convincing, although 
they have made it impossible for us wholly to 
ignore the factors whose influence upon literary 
production Taine believed to be paramount. To 
win acceptance, a scientific method must show 
itself productive of similar results when employed 



216 Little Leaders 

by many different observers, and it must fulfil 
the supreme test of enabling us to forecast the 
future with certainty. Tried by the first of these 
tests, the method has already been found want- 
ing; that it will meet the second there is no good 
reason to believe. Whatever future the method 
may have will be found in its application to the 
general course of national literary developments. 
It will never foretell the individual manifestations 
of genius, as it never fully accounted for such phe- 
nomena as they occur in the past. For that task 
we shall need a deeper psychology than Taine, or 
any other thinker of the present century, has had 
at his command. But the fact that we cannot 
accept Taine's literary method should not pre- 
vent us from giving full credit to the many bril- 
liant qualities of the work in which it had its 
most forcible expression. For Taine's work, with 
all its defects, is a better book than has yet been 
produced upon the whole of our literature by any 
one to the manner born. Every man has his 
limitations, and they sometimes appear most un- 
expectedly ; in the finest of critical writing we 
come upon such grotesque vagaries as Taine's 
estimate of Tennyson, and Arnold's estimate of 









In Memoriam 217 

Shelley. We accept these things as we do the 
spots on the sun's disc, and do not for that say 
that the light is but darkness. Had Taine been 
an English writer, we should have been surprised 
at the infrequency in his work of defective sym- 
pathies and untenable literary judgments. When 
we reflect that to know our literature he had first 
to learn our language, surprise gives place to won- 
der, and we think, not of the few cases in which 
he has failed to grasp the significance of our writ- 
ers, but of the many whom he has discussed with 
penetrating sympathy and deep discernment. We 
think, for example, of his treatment of Swift, 
whom no critic, English or foreign, has better 
understood than he ; we think of his treatment 
of the Elizabethan dramatists, and ask if it be 
possible that Voltaire lived but a century before. 
The work of Taine's latest years will probably 
be accounted the greatest of his life. The writ- 
ing of ' Les Origines de la France Contempo- 
raine ' was begun about twenty years ago. Dur- 
ing that period we have had, at intervals of a few 
years, c L'Ancien Regime,' dealing with the an- 
tecedent causes of the Revolution ; ' La Revo- 
lution,' in three volumes ; and the first of the two 



2i 8 Little Leaders 

volumes in which the author proposed to deal 
with the Napoleonic period and its influence upon 
nineteenth century France. This great work is 
open to criticism on the score of its unfairness to 
the ideas and the leaders of the Revolution ; it 
undoubtedly exaggerates the merits of the old 
order of things, and as undoubtedly fails in doing 
justice to the moral forces that made the Revo- 
lution triumphant for years, with all Europe 
armed against it. But in spite of these short- 
comings the work gives us a more comprehensive 
array of facts and a more scientific sifting of ev- 
idence than has been given us by any previous 
historian of the subject. The legend of the Rev- 
olution can never again be what it was before 
Taine's merciless exposition of its intimate his- 
tory. As for the Napoleonic legend, Taine has 
given that its coup de grace ; he has put Napoleon 
upon record for the brigand that he was, and once 
for all voiced the sane judgment of posterity upon 
his character and his career. The concluding 
volume of this great historical work, left nearly 
finished at his death, was designed by the author 
1 to treat of the church, the school, and the fam- 
ily, describe the modern milieu, and note the facil- 



In Memoriam 219 

ities and obstacles which a society like our own 
encounters in this new milieu? A dying man 
can have no greater consolation than the con- 
sciousness of having completed the work of his 
life; and it is pleasant to think that Taine's last 
hours, like those of Renan, were solaced by this 
reflection. 



220 Little Leaders 



GUSTAV FREYTAG. 

Gustav Freytag, who died at Wiesbaden, where 
he had lived in retirement since 1879, has been, 
on the whole, the most conspicuous figure in the 
German literature of the half-century now nearly 
ended, and of his contemporaries among belletris- 
tic prose-writers, not more than half a dozen — 
Reuter, Auerbach, and SchefFel among the dead, 
Herren Spielhagen, Heyse, and Dahn among the 
living — can claim a rank comparable with his. 
The life-work upon which his reputation rests 
was practically done during the quarter-century 
between 1855 and 1880, and of late years, 
although not wholly inactive, he has appeared a 
figure of the past rather than of the present. But 
his death seems none the less a shock, and his 
loss will be deeply mourned by the country of 
which he so honored the literature, and which 
stands to-day in greater need than ever of the 
social ideals inculcated by his works. 

Freytag was born at Kreuzberg, in Silesia, 






In Memoriam 221 

July 13, 1 8 16, thus living nearly to complete 
his seventy-ninth year. The son of a physician, 
he received his gymnasial training at Oels, and 
continued his studies at the Universities of Bres- 
lau and Berlin. Teutonic philology was his spe- 
cial subject, and his thesis for the doctorate, 
offered in 1838, was enitled c De Initiis Scenicae 
Poeseos apud Germanos.' The years 1839 — 
1846 were spent at Breslau as a privat-docent. 
In 1847 ne marf ied a lady of rank and wealth, 
removed to Dresden, and shortly thereafter to 
Leipzig, where he engaged in the editorial con- 
duct of * Die Grenzboten/ His connection with 
this periodical was maintained (with an intermis- 
sion from 1 86 1 to 1867) until 1870. He had 
meanwhile (1867,) become a liberal member of 
the Nord-Deutscher Reichstag. When the war 
of 1870 came, he joined the staff of the Crown 
Prince, and remained in the service up to Sedan. 
In that year also he became associated with the 
new weekly paper ' Im Deutschen Reich.' The 
loss of his wife in 1873, a subsequent marriage 
followed by a second bereavement, and his re- 
moval to Wiesbaden, constitute the remaining 
facts of external interest in his life. 



222 Little Leaders 

Frey tag's literary activity began during his 
years as a docent at Breslau, with a volume of lyr- 
ical poems, and four dramas — c Die Brautfahrt,' 
'Der Gelehrte,' 'Die Valentine,' and 'Graf 
Waldemar.' Two other dramas, 'Die Journal- 
isten' (1854) and 'Die Fabier' (1859), com - 
plete the list of his writings for the stage, although 
in his ' Technik des Dramas,' published many 
years later, he was to do dramatic art an even 
greater service than that of producing so accept- 
able and healthful a stage-play as ' Die Journal- 
isten.' This discussion of the principles of dra- 
matic art, recently translated into English, is one 
of the most valuable of modern contributions to 
the subject with which it deals, and has the added 
weight of coming from a highly successful writer 
of plays. 

Freytag's greatest work, the novel ' Soil und 
Haben,' well known to English readers as ' Debit 
and Credit,' appeared in 1855, and at once won 
for its writer the most cordial recognition from 
all discerning critics, although there were not 
lacking those who saw in the work the apotheo- 
sis of philistinism. Deliberately putting aside the 
romantic ideals of contemporary German novel- 



In Memoriam 223 

ists, the author of c Soil und Haben ' made of the 
merchant type the centre of interest, and the 
world of commerce that in which the scenes were 
laid. Realism of the good honest sort dominates 
this work, which depicts with unsurpassed fidelity 
the manners of a provincial town. Romantic 
elements, such as the episode of the Polish insur- 
rection, are not lacking, but they are strictly sub- 
ordinated to the controlling idea of the novel, 
which is that of rehabilitating in the eyes of the 
novel-reader those types of character which he is 
too apt to set lightly aside as prosaic, although 
they form the bone and sinew of every modern 
nation well advanced in the ways of civilization. 
That commercial integrity is as fine a thing as 
military glory, that the virtues of sobriety, pa- 
tience, perseverance, devotion to the task at hand, 
and the performance of the humblest duties just 
because they are duties, are among the worthiest 
objects of endeavor — these are the lessons of the 
work, not too obtrusively inculcated, but every- 
where underlying its structure. So genuine a 
piece of fiction is not often met with, or one that 
will so well bear scrutiny. 

'Die Verlorne Handschrift,' published in 1864, 



224 Little Leaders 

following the first novel at an interval of nearly 
ten years, is less obviously a masterpiece than 
* Soil und Haben,' yet it must always occupy a 
high rank among the best products of German 
fiction. The story is that of a university pro- 
fessor, a large part of whose life is spent in the 
search for a manuscript of Tacitus, which he has 
reason to believe is still extant. His fate may 
be compared to that of Saul the son of Kish, for, 
while the manuscript eludes his pursuit, he finds 
instead, and wins for his wife, a very charming 
woman. The book abounds in admirable pas- 
sages descriptive of life in a university town and 
at the court of a petty German prince. The 
author does not gild the commonplace as success- 
fully as in c Soil und Haben,' and his attempt to 
be humorous must be reckoned a distinct failure. 
On the other hand, the work abounds in fine, 
even eloquent, passages, among which the occa- 
sional characterizations of Tacitus are the most 
impressive. These, however, are the work rather 
of the essayist and historian than of the novelist, 
and our enjoyment of them has little to do with 
our interest in the story. The underlying pur- 
pose of ' Die Verlorne Handschrift ' is the exal- 



In Memoriam 225 

tation of the scholar's life, at the expense of more 
popular ideals, just as the purpose of c Soil und 
Haben ' is the glorification — if we may use so 
strong a word — of the even less romantic life of 
the honest merchant. These two ideals, surely 
among the worthiest that can be urged, were and 
are peculiarly needed in Germany, where the 
unworthy ideals of militarism and the aristocracy 
are still opposed to them, and still have a stronger 
hold upon the nation than in most other civilized 
countries. 

The books thus far enumerated, together with 
the series of c Bilder aus der Deutchen Vergang- 
enheit' (1859-1862) and the biography of his 
friend Karl Mathy (1870), complete the list of 
Freytag's works up to the period of the War of 
1870. The outcome of that conflict, so import- 
ant to every German in its political significance, 
must be reckoned among the influences that 
shaped the literary activity of the novelist's re- 
maining years. The most ambitious of all his 
undertakings is that of which the execution was 
begun soon after 1870, and which has repre- 
sented the greater part of his literary activity since 
that date. It was during the course of the War 



226 Little Leaders 

that the plan of ' Die Ahnen ' suggested itself to 
his mind, and the first person to whom the pro- 
ject was confided was the Crown Prince. The 
scope of the proposed work was thus defined in 
the dedication : 

' This work is to contain a series of freely invented 
tales, in which are related the destinies of one family. It 
begins with ancestors of an early time, and shall (if the 
author retain his vigor and his interest in the work) be 
gradually brought down to the latest descendant, a hearty 
fellow who is now going about under the light of the 
German sun, without concerning himself very much 
about the deeds or trials of his forefathers. The book 
aims to contain poetic fiction, — and by no means a "his- 
tory of culture." ' 

With these introductory words may be placed the 
other words appended to the last volume of the 
series : 

* The author of " Die Ahnen M will be gratified if the 
reader will consider the work as a symphony, in whose 
eight parts a melodic theme is varied, carried out, and 
interwoven with others, in such a manner that all the 
parts, taken together, form a unit.' 

The eight sections of c Die Ahnen ' were pub- 
lished in six volumes, between 1872 and 1880. 
The first volume, c Ingo und Ingraban,' contains 
two episodes, both placed in Thuringia, and deal- 



In Memoriam 227 

ing respectively with the fourth and eighth centu- 
ries, with the Germanic struggle against Roman 
domination and the later struggle of the Franks 
against the encroaching Slavs. c Das Nest der 
Zaunkonige' (1874) deals with the eleventh cen- 
tury and the reestablishment of the imperial power 
by Henry II. c Die Briider vom Deutschen 
Hause ' (1875) brings us to the thirteenth cen- 
tury, to the crusades, chivalry, and Frederick II. 
'Marcus K6nig' (1876) is concerned with the 
period of the Reformation. ' Die Geschwister ' 
(1878) consists of two parts, 'Der Rittmeister 
von Alt-Rosen,' placed just after the Thirty 
Years' War, and ' Der Feldcorporal bei Mark- 
graf-Albrecht,' placed in the times of Frederick 
William I. of Prussia. 'Aus einer Kleinen Stadt' 
(1880) brings us down to the Napoleonic inva- 
sion and the German national uprising of 18 13. 
To this tale is added a ' Schluss,' in which the 
latest descendant of Ingo becomes a liberal editor 
and political idealist of our own times. German 
fiction has few works equal to c Die Ahnen ' in 
symmetry of plan and excellence of execution, 
and no student of the literature can afford to 
leave the series unread. 



228 Little Leaders 

The temper in which Freytag wrote, not only 
1 Die Ahnen,' but his other books of fiction as 
well, may be illustrated by a c thought ' which he 
contributed as a sort of motto to the English 
translation of * Die Verlorne Handschrift ' made 
a few years ago. 'An efficient human life does 
not end upon earth with death ; it persists in the 
disposition and acts of friends, as well as in the 
thoughts and activities of the nation.' This sense 
of the ideal continuity of soul-life is perhaps the 
main underlying motive of the best part of Frey- 
tag's work ; a work, let us add, that everywhere 
appeals to the deepest and best instincts of our 
nature. 



In Memoriam 229 



JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. 

The death of Mr. Symonds, at Rome, has re- 
moved from the field of English letters one of its 
most graceful and accomplished representatives. 
He had only reached the age of fifty-two (Shakes- 
peare's age), but his death was not wholly unex- 
pected. Many years ago he was forced to leave 
England by pulmonary disease that threatened 
his life, and to take up a practically permanent 
residence at Davos, in the Engadine. His life 
in this mountain home has been described by 
himself in a number of charming magazine ar- 
ticles, and by his daughter in a recently published 
volume. He occasionally ventured upon short 
excursions from his seat of exile — mostly into 
Italy for the collection of the material required 
by his literary work — and it was upon one of 
these excursions that he gave up the long struggle 
with ill health. 

His enforced residence in what was, for the 
literary worker, an almost complete solitude, has 



230 Little Leaders 

left its mark upon the work of his later years. 
Absence from all libraries but his own has given 
to much of that work an inadequate character, 
and left it lacking in the accuracy demanded by 
modern scholarship. For these defects, con- 
sidering their excuse, he has been subjected to 
unfairly harsh criticism. It is really remarkable, 
under the conditions, that his work should have 
as high a scientific character as that with which 
it must be credited, and it surely offers a case in 
which the verdict of justice should be tempered 
by that of mercy. On the other hand, the author's 
long freedom from the distractions of English life 
enabled him to become a prolific worker, and the 
literary activity of his later years has been very 
marked. He has produced new volumes in rapid 
succession, and most of them have been volumes 
of unquestionable importance. Much of his later 
work has been shaped by the necessities of his 
isolated situation, and has taken forms that did 
not require the resources of great collections of 
material. His translations from the Italian, and 
his subtle analyses of the principles of aesthetic 
criticism, are illustrations of this general state- 
ment, although we must admit that the most im- 



In Memoriam 231 

portant of his later works, the life of Michel- 
angelo, had to be, and was, based upon an 
exhaustive study of the contemporary documents. 
As these were to be found in Italy, a country 
within his reach, he was enabled, even in his 
years of exile, to produce one work of capital 
scientific value. 

Whatever form Mr. Symonds might give to 
his work, it was, like that of the great French- 
man whose loss we have so lately mourned, es- 
sentially critical in spirit, and its author will be 
remembered among the critics, rather than among 
the poets, the travellers, or the narrative histori- 
ans. But his critical method was radically unlike 
that of his French contemporary, being as sub- 
jective as that of Taine was objective. He con- 
stantly sought to place himself within the mind 
of the writer or historical character with whom 
he was engaged, to see the world with his eyes, 
and to treat the environment as secondary in time 
if not in significance. Taine, as we all know, 
deduced the man and his work from the sur- 
rounding conditions ; Symonds took the man and 
his work as the data of the problem, seeking to 
understand rather than to account for them. We 



232 Little Leaders 

are not here concerned to compare the two meth- 
ods of work. Both of them are capable of ex- 
cellent results, and either of them, if carried far 
enough, involves the other. It is sufficient to say 
that a writer committed to the one does not, as a 
rule, realize all the possibilities of the other, and 
falls short of that synthesis of the two that will 
produce the criticism of the future. 

When Schelling spoke of architecture as frozen 
music, he sounded the keynote of what we may 
call the romantic manner in criticism. c In ro- 
mantic writing/ as we are told by Professor Sid- 
ney Colvin, c all objects are exhibited as it were 
through a colored and iridescent atmosphere. 
Round about every central idea the romantic 
writer summons up a cloud of accessory and sub- 
ordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, 
if at the risk of confusing its outlines.' To Mr. 
Symonds as a critic this definition of romanticism 
closely applies. A student of all the arts, a lover 
of natural no less than of man-created beauty, he 
was constantly bringing one set of impressions to 
the aid of another. He delighted in illustrating 
poetry by the phrases of landscape, and painting 



In Memoriam 233 

by the language of music. Those who will have 
only the clean-cut critical phraseology of Sainte- 
Beuve and Arnold resent the exuberance of Sy- 
monds, and do imperfect justice to its beauty as 
well as to its power of making a lasting impression. 
If they admit the latter quality, they will say that 
the impression is false, that the half-lights of ro- 
manticism are misleading, and that each artistic 
or other embodiment of beauty has its distinct 
province, forgetting that all forms of beauty ap- 
peal to the same emotional consciousness, and 
that the law of association is no less valid in the 
emotional than in the intellectual sphere. Pro- 
fessor Tyrrell, in a satirical sketch of the modern 
methods of classical study, says : c To study the 
works, for instance, of the Greek dramatists is no 
longer a road to success as a scholar, or as a stu- 
dent. No : you must be ready to liken iEschy- 
lus to an Alpine crevasse^ Sophocles to a fair 
avenue of elms, and Euripides to an amber weep- 
ing Phaethontid, or a town-pump in need of re- 
pairing.' This is clearly a reference to such books 
as Symonds's c Studies of the Greek Poets,' and 
yet that book has done more to rouse an enthu- 



234 Little Leaders 

siasm for Greek poetry, and foster a desire for its 
acquaintance, than all the unromantic tomes of 
the grammarians. 

One subject Mr. Symonds made his own, and 
by his work done upon that subject he will be 
chiefly remembered. The Italian Renaissance 
has had historians of more minutely accurate 
scholarship, and its separate phases have perhaps 
found occasional treatment subtler and more pro- 
found than it was in his power to give them. But 
the period as a whole, its political and domestic 
life, its literature and art, received at his hands a 
treatment that lacks neither grasp nor sympathy, 
that is distinctly the best and most attractive in 
English literature. This treatment is chiefly em- 
bodied in the series of seven volumes, beginning 
with i The Age of the Despots ' and ending with 
the c Catholic Reaction,' but is also to be sought 
in the masterly life of Michelangelo, in ' An 
Introduction to the Study of Dante,' in the verse 
and prose translations from Italian literature, and 
in the host of studies and sketches from time to 
time contributed to the periodicals. Upon the 
fascinating period with which all this work deals 
the best part of the author's thought was centred, 






In Memoriam 235 

and modern criticism offers few instances of so 
close an adaptation of a writer to his theme. 
Both by temperament and by training he was the 
man for the work, and the way in which, the 
main body of the work accomplished, he has lin- 
gered upon the outskirts of his chosen field of 
study reveals the extent to which the subject took 
possession of his mind and sympathies. The au- 
thor's studies of other literatures than the Italian 
are chiefly represented by his work on the Greek 
poets, his essay on Lucretius, his ' Sidney ' and 
c Shelley' in the c English Men of Letters' series, 
his c Jonson ' in the series of c English Worthies,' 
and his thick volume entitled * Shakespeare's Pre- 
decessors in the English Drama,' intended to be 
the first volume of a complete history of our 
great dramatic period. His volumes of travel in 
Italy and Greece are genuine literature, exempli- 
fying the wealth of his learning, the justness of 
his perceptions, and the beauty of his style. His 
original verse, considerable in amount, falls short 
of being great poetry, but may be read with keen 
pleasure, and appeals strongly to the reflective 
mind. His essays on the principles of aesthetics 
are burdened with verbiage and not always lucid 



236 Little Leaders 

in enunciation, but they are weighty enough am- 
ply to repay their readers. When we consider 
his work as a whole we are impressed with its 
range, its sanity, and its devotion to the Goethean 
ideal of the good, true, and beautiful. His death 
has made a conspicuous vacancy in the rapidly 
thinning ranks of our older writers, and upon no 
other shoulders does his particular mantle seem 
yet to have fallen. 



In Memoriam 237 



CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI. 

One of the closing days of 1894 was saddened 
by the death of Miss Rossetti, the youngest of 
that famous quartette of brothers and sisters of 
whom Mr. W. M. Rossetti is now left the sole 
survivor. Maria Francesca, who died in 1876, 
was the oldest of the four, having first seen the 
light in 1827. Then came Dante Gabriel in 
1828, William Michael in 1829, ana * Christina 
Georgina in 1830. Miss Rossetti gave early 
evidence of her poetic talents, as is shown by the 
privately-printed volume of 'Verses' dated 1847. 
In 1850, with her brothers, she wrote for the 
famous 'Germ,' over the pseudonymous signa- 
ture of ' Ellen Alleyne.' It was not, however, 
until 1862 that she took her destined place among 
the greater Victorian poets, with c Goblin Mar- 
ket and Other Poems/ That volume was fol- 
lowed, in 1866, by 'The Prince's Progress and 
Other Poems/ and, in 1 881, by ' A Pageant and 
Other Poems.' It is upon the contents of these 



238 Little Leaders 

three collections that Miss Rossetti's reputation 
must rest, although she did a considerable amount 
of other literary work. Before discussing the 
character of her poems, we may dispose of the 
other books by a simple enumeration. ' Com- 
monplace and Other Short Stories' (1870) and 
'Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme-Book ' (1872) 
are titles that speak for themselves. ' Speaking 
Likenesses,' a volume of 'quasi-allegorical prose,' 
and ' Annus Domini : A Prayer for Every Day 
in the Year,' both bear the date 1874. 'Seek 
and Find,' ' Called to the Saints,' and ' Letter and 
Spirit,' three religious works in prose, date from 
1879, 1 88 1, and 1883, respectively; while 'Time 
Flies,' a reading diary in alternate verse and prose, 
appeared in 1885, and was, we believe, her last 
published volume. These devotional books, 
which have both found and deserved a large and 
appreciative audience, are distinctly out of the 
common, but the spirit which finds expression in 
them finds utterance still more intense and rap- 
turous in the three volumes of song to which we 
now turn. 

It is not the least of the glories of English poe- 



In Memoriam 239 

try that two women should be numbered among 
the singers whom we most love and honor. It 
is perhaps idle to inquire whether Mrs. Brown- 
ing or Miss Rossetti is to be esteemed the greater 
poet ; the one thing certain is that no other En- 
glish woman is to be named in the same breath 
with them. These two stand far apart from the 
throng, lifted above it by inspiration and achieve- 
ment, and no account of the greater poetry of our 
century can ignore them. If there is something 
more instinctive, more inevitable in impulse, 
about the work of Mrs. Browning, there is more 
of restraint and of artistic finish about the work 
of Miss Rossetti. The test of popularity would 
assign to the former the higher rank, just as it 
would place Byron above Keats and Coleridge, 
or above Wordsworth and Shelley j but the critic 
has better tests than the noisy verdicts of the 
multitude, and those tests lessen, if they do not 
quite do away with, the seeming disparity between 
the fame of the two women. 

The longer pieces which introduce Miss Ros- 
setti's three volumes are not the most successful 
of their contents. It is rather to the lyrics, bal- 



240 Little Leaders 

lads, and sonnets that the lover of poetry will 
turn to find her at her best. Who, for example, 
could once read and ever forget such a sonnet as 
<Rest'? 

« O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; 

Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; 
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth 
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. 
She hath no questions, she hath no replies, 

Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth 
Of all that irked her from the hour of birth, 
With stillness that is almost Paradise. 
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her, 

Silence more musical than any song; 
Even her very heart hath ceased to stir: 
Until the morning of Eternity 
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be; 
And when she wakes she will not think it long." 

Or who could escape the haunting quality of 
such a lyric as this : 

* When I am dead, my dearest, 
Sing no sad songs for me; 
Plant thou no roses at my head, 

Nor shady cypress-tree; 
Be the green grass above me 

With showers and dewdrops wet; 
And if thou wilt, remember, 
And if thou wilt, forget. 



In Memoriam 241 

« I shall not see the shadows, 

I shall not feel the rain 5 
I shall not hear the nightingale 

Sing on, as if in pain : 
And dreaming through the twilight 

That doth not rise nor set, 
Haply I may remember, 

And haply may forget.' 

The poem just quoted can hardly fail to re- 
call, in feeling, thought, and measure, Mr. Swin- 
burne's c Rococo,' and thus emphasizes the spirit- 
ual relationship of the author to the poets of the 
group sometimes styled c Pre-Raphaelite.' Sim- 
ilarly, the perfect lyric called c Dream-Land ' is 
clearly akin to c The Garden of Proserpine,' and 
it is not difficult to discern the same sort of kin- 
ship between Miss Rossetti's c Up-Hill ' and Mr. 
Swinburne's c The Pilgrims.' Now the point to 
be noted is that all three of Miss Rossetti's poems 
were published in the volume of 1862, while the 
three Swinburnian poems date from several years 
later. There is, of course, no question of imita- 
tion — in each case what remains a simple theme 
with the one poet is elaborated into a symphony 
by the other — but it is difficult to escape the 
conclusion that the man was influenced by the 



242 Little Leaders 

woman in all three of the cases. Particularly 
with ' Up-Hill ' and ' The Pilgrims/ we note the 
common use of the dialogue form and the abso- 
lute identity of the austere ethical motive. 

Miss Rossetti's verses sometimes suggest those 
of other poets, but we always feel that her art is 
distinctly her own. The divine simplicity of 
Blake is echoed in such a stanza as 
* What can lambkins do 

All the keen night through ? 
Nestle by their woolly mother, 
The careful ewe.' 

The melting, almost cloying, sweetness of the 
Tennysonian lyric meets us in these verses : 
* Come to me in the silence of the night; 
Come in the speaking silence of a dream; 
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright 
As sunlight on a stream; 
Come back in tears, 
O memory, hope, love of finished years.' 

As for the influence of the great Italian, which 
shaped so powerfully the thought of every mem- 
ber of the Rossetti family, it is less tangible here 
than in the work of her greater brother, yet to it 
must be attributed much of the tenderness and 



In Memoriam 243 

the pervasive mysticism of her poems. It is per- 
haps most apparent in the two sonnet-sequences, 
1 Monna Innominata ' and ' Later Life,' both in- 
cluded in the volume of 1 88 1 . And the influence 
of that brother who bore the sacred name of the 
Florentine is likewise intangible but pervasive. 
We get a glimpse of it in ' Amor Mundi,' for 
example, and in many a vanitas vanitatum strain. 
But we must repeat that Miss Rossetti's genius 
was too original to be chargeable with anything 
more than that assimilation of spiritual influence 
from which no poet can hope wholly to escape, 
and which links together in one golden chain the 
poetic tradition of the ages. 

If in most of the provinces of the lyric realm 
Miss Rossetti's verse challenges comparison with 
that of our greater singers, it is in the religious 
province that the challenge is most imperative 
and her mastery most manifest. Not in Keble 
or Newman, not in Herbert or Vaughan, do we 
find a clearer or more beautiful expression of the 
religious sentiment than is dominant in Miss Ros- 
setti's three books. In this respect, at least, she 
is unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, by any of 



244 Little Leaders 

her contemporaries. In her devotional pieces 
there is no touch of affectation, artificiality, or 
insincerity. Such poems as ' The Three Ene- 
mies ' and ' Advent ' in the first volume, ' Para- 
dise ' and ' The Lowest Place ' in the second, 
and many of the glorious lyrics and sonnets of 
the third, will long be treasured among the re- 
ligious classics of the English language. Perhaps 
the poet's highest achievement in this kind is the 
c Old and New Year Ditties ' of the first volume. 
Some such claim, at least, has been made by no 
less an authority than Mr. Swinburne for the 
closing section of the poem. 

* Passing away, saith the World, passing away; 
Chances, beauty, and youth sapped day by dayj 
Thy life never continueth in one stay. 

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray 

That hath won neither laurel nor bay ? 

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: 

Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay 

On my bosom for aye. 

Then I answered: Yea. 

* Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away} 
With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play; 
Hearken what the past doth witness and say: 

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, 



In Memoriam 245 

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. 

At midnight, at cock-crow, at morning, one certain day 

Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay: 

Watch thou and pray. 

Then I answered: Yea. 

* Passing away, saith my God, passing away : 

Winter passeth after the long delay; 

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, 

Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. 

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray. 

Arise, come away, night is past, and lo it is day, 

My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. 

Then I answered: Yea.' 

It is peculiarly fitting that the author of these fer- 
vid and solemn verses, written for one New 
Year's season, should herself have passed away 
on the very eve of another. 



v 



246 Little Leaders 



JOHN TYNDALL. 

Looking over the death-roll of 1893, we are 
more than once reminded of Lear's terrible fa- 
talism : 

1 As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, 
They kill us for their sport.' 

Freeman, hardly beyond his prime, found his 
death in a Spanish inn, the victim of a pox- 
infected mattress. Symonds, with many fruitful 
years seemingly before him, was taken off by a 
cold that passed into pneumonia, while return- 
ing from the last of his Italian journeys. To 
Tschaikowsky, on a visit to St. Petersburg, death 
came in a pestilential draught of water, and chol- 
era marked him for its own in the fulness of his 
powers. Last of all, and most ironical in its ac- 
cent, came word that John Tyndall was dead, 
but from no blow dealt by the legitimate assail- 
ants of mortality. An overdose of chloral, given 
by the fatal error of a loving wife, cut short his 
career, prematurely, we must say, although the 



In Memoriam 247 

best of his work was doubtless accomplished. 
Professor Tyndall occupied a large place in 
English scientific thought, and the vacancy caused 
by his death will not easily be filled. His orig- 
inal researches resulted in important contributions 
to knowledge, especially in the domain of molec- 
ular physics. Although they do not place him 
in the first rank of nineteenth century English- 
men of science, they secure for him a high posi- 
tion in the second. He belongs with Professor 
Huxley and Lord Kelvin, rather than with Dar- 
win and Maxwell. He had the German training, 
and he combined the German thoroughness with 
the English instinct for systematic and perspicu- 
ous presentation. Great as was his service in the 
character of an investigator, he did a still greater 
service to his countrymen in the character of an 
expositor. What Professor Huxley did for the 
new biology created by Darwin, was done by Pro- 
fessor Tyndall for the new physics created by 
Joule and Faraday and Maxwell. It is custom- 
ary in certain quarters to sneer at popular science ; 
and there is not a little popular science, so-called, 
which justifies the attitude of contempt. But 
no such reproach attaches to the work of men 



248 Little Leaders 

like Tyndall, whose knowledge of the subjects 
with which he dealt was both thorough and accu- 
rate. It is difficult to estimate the full value 
of the work done for the advancement of English 
public opinion in matters of science by the group 
of writers to which Tyndall belonged, and of 
which his death left Professor Huxley the most 
distinguished remaining representative. They 
came at just the right time, and they brought just 
the right kind of powers to their task. Without 
the labors of these men, the great nineteenth cen- 
tury revolution in physical and biological science 
would indeed have been, none the later, a fait 
accompli-, but it would have taken much longer 
to reach the popular consciousness. 

Professor Tyndall stood in the vanguard of the 
revolutionary forces, and bore the brunt of the 
battle. Twenty years ago, he incurred the odium 
theologicum by an article in c The Contemporary 
Review,' proposing that the efficacy of praver 
should be subjected to a scientific test. He little 
thought, good easy man, what a hornets' nest this 
cold-blooded suggestion would bring about his 
ears. When, in the year following this incident, 
he was presented at Oxford for the honorary doc- 



In Memoriam 249 

torate, he found his candidacy bitterly opposed by 
one of the professors of divinity in the University, 
on the ground that his teachings contravened ' the 
whole tenor of that book, which with its open 
page inscribed Dominus illuminatio mea the Uni- 
versity still bears as her device.' Only a year 
later than this, his address before the Belfast 
meeting of the British Association, in which ad- 
dress he professed to discern in matter c the prom- 
ise and potency of every form and quality of life,' 
again aroused his theological opponents, and 
fanned afresh the flame of their zealous indigna- 
tion. Only three or four years before these oc- 
currences, Professor Huxley, in a lecture upon 
Descartes, speaking of the religious persecution 
of which that philosopher was a victim, had said : 
c There are one or two living men, who, a couple 
of centuries hence, will be remembered as Des- 
cartes is now, because they have produced great 
thoughts which will live and grow as long as man- 
kind lasts. If the twenty-first century studies 
their history, it will find that the Christianity of 
the middle of the nineteenth century recognized 
them only as objects of vilification.' The vilifi- 
cation to which Tyndall was subjected, in conse- 



250 Little Leaders 

quence of the acts above alluded to, came as a 
prompt and striking new illustration of Professor 
Huxley's remark. 

Most earnest men, watching the world from 
day to day, get impatient because it moves so 
slowly. And yet, looking back over a few years, 
the same men will find cause for astonishment 
at the rapidity of its advance in this nineteenth 
century of ours. The Copernican doctrine re- 
quired from one to two centuries to make its 
way ; the Darwinian doctrine accomplished an 
equal revolution of thought in one or two de- 
cades. The suggestions that seemed so startling 
when made by Tyndall twenty years ago would 
to-day hardly cause a ripple of excitement any- 
where. Few intelligent people, whatever their 
religious beliefs, are now shocked at the admis- 
sion of spontaneous generation as a necessary link 
in the evolutionary chain, and few of them hold 
to a doctrine of prayer that invites such tests as 
that proposed by Tyndall in the early seventies. 
Of recent years, Tyndall has been assailed by 
the politicians almost as vehemently as he was 
once assailed by the theologians, and time will 
bring him a justification similar to that which it 



In Memoriam 251 

has brought him in the earlier controversy. In 
his denunciation of the recent Gladstonian at- 
tempt to dismember the United Kingdom he 
joined himself with such men as Tennyson and 
Matthew Arnold, and his memory need fear no 
defeat in that alliance. 

The noble intellectual temper of the man that 
has just died, the bent of mind which we venture 
to call essentially religious in spite of the religious 
antagonisms which it evoked, and the eloquence 
of expression that he knew how to impart to the 
subjects which so deeply concerned him, may 
most fittingly be illustrated by the closing para- 
graph of the famous Belfast Address : 

'And now the end has come. With more time, or 
greater strength and knowledge, what has been here said 
might have been better said, while worthy matters here 
omitted might have received fit expression. But there 
would have been no material deviation from the views 
set forth. As regards myself, they are not the growth 
of a day j and as regards you, I thought you ought to 
know the environment which, with or without your con- 
sent, is rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to which 
some adjustment on your part may be necessary. A hint 
of Hamlet's, however, teaches us all how the troubles of 
common life may be ended; and it is perfectly possible 
for you and me to purchase intellectual peace at the price 



252 Little Leaders 

of intellectual death. The world is not without refuges 
of this description; nor is it wanting in persons who seek 
their shelter and try to persuade others to do the same. 
I would exhort you to refuse such shelter, and to scorn 
such base repose — to accept, if the choice be forced 
upon you, commotion before stagnation, the leap of the 
torrent before the stillness of the swamp. In the one 
there is at all events life, and therefore hope; in the other, 
none. I have touched on debatable questions, and led 
you over dangerous ground — and this partly with the 
view of telling you, and through you the world, that as 
regards these questions science claims unrestricted right 
of search. It is not to the point to say that the views of 
Lucretius and Bruno, of Darwin and Spencer, may be 
wrong. Here I should agree with you, deeming it in- 
deed certain that these views will undergo modification. 
But the point is, that, whether right or wrong, we claim 
the right to discuss them. The ground which they cover 
is scientific ground; and the right claimed is one made 
good through tribulation and anguish, inflicted and en- 
dured in darker times than ours, but resulting in the im- 
mortal victories which science has won for the human 
race. I would set forth equally the inexorable advance 
of man's understanding in the path of knowledge, and 
the unquenchable claims of his emotional nature which 
the understanding can never satisfy. The world embraces 
not only a Newton, but a Shakespeare — not only a 
Boyle, but a Raphael — not only a Kant, but a Beetho- 
ven — not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in each 



In Memoriam 253 

of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are 
not opposed, but supplementary — not mutually exclu- 
sive, but reconcilable. And if, still unsatisfied, the hu- 
man mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant 
home, will turn to the mystery from which it has emerged, 
seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to thought and 
faith, so long as this is done, not only without intolerance 
or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened recogni- 
tion that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattainable, 
and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion 
the mystery in accordance with its own needs — then, in 
opposition to all the restrictions of materialism, I would 
affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, 
in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the 
creative faculties of man. Here, however, I must quit 
a theme too great for me to handle, but which will be 
handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I, like 
streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the in- 
finite azure of the past. * 

This fine peroration, which we have quoted in 
its entirety, serves better than a volume of com- 
ment to explain the influence which Tyndall has 
exerted upon his contemporaries, and especially 
upon the younger generation. The scientist of 
the dryasdust type may scoff at it as mere rhetoric, 
but it has stirred many of its readers as with a 
trumpet-call to steadfastness and honesty of pur- 






254 Little Leaders 

pose in the pursuit of truth. The power to write 
in this fashion, backed by the power to employ 
the most rigorous of scientific methods in his own 
researches, made of Tyndall one of the most vital 
of the directive intellectual forces of his age, and 
brings to his memory a host of mourners who 
early caught the contagion of his spirit, and have 
sought to follow in his footsteps. 



i ^a 



In Memoriam 255 



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. 

The death of Professor Huxley came not with- 
out warning, and he had to his account the exact 
scriptural tale of a man's years. A worker and 
a fighter all his life, the pen was in his hand 
when overtaken by the illness that was to prove 
fatal in the end, and he was replying, with una- 
bated vigor of expression and force of logic, to 
the latest attack made by mysticism upon that 
stronghold of reasoned and ordered knowledge 
which we call science, and of which he had for 
nearly half a century been one of the doughtiest 
of defenders. 

In the popular consciousness, indeed, Huxley 
ranked among the leading representatives of En- 
glish science, probably as the foremost among 
them after the death of his old-time colleague, 
John Tyndall. It may be worth while to con- 
sider for a moment what this estimate means. 
There is practically no such thing, in the present 
age of the world, as the representation of science 



256 Little Leaders 

by any one man. Aristotle was perhaps the only 
man for whom, in any age, that distinction may 
be claimed. Nowadays, a man can represent 
science only by representing biology, or physics, 
or geology, or something even narrower than 
these. Huxley represented English science in 
the sense that he gave a large part of his life to 
the subject of comparative anatomy, and made 
some fairly important contributions to our knowl- 
edge of that subject. But his work was not 
comparable to that, in their respective subjects, 
of such men as Faraday, or Lyell, or Maxwell, 
to say nothing of Darwin. It was good work, 
without doubt, but it was equalled by a score of 
Englishmen of his own generation, and surpassed 
by a respectable number. 

But the average person, when he thinks of 
Huxley as a scientific leader, recks little of his 
comparative anatomy, and has probablv never 
heard of the great work on l Oceanic Hydrozoa,' 
the manuals of vertebrate and invertebrate anat- 
omv, or even the monograph on ' The Cray- 
Fish.' It is a very different sort of work that 
has given Huxlev his immense reputation, the 
work which, for the most part, mav be found in 



In Memoriam 257 

the nine volumes of his ' Collected Essays,' and 
which is, of its kind, almost unparallelled in our 
literature. These volumes, it is true, have a 
great deal to say about science — biological sci- 
ence in particular — but they announce no origi- 
nal investigations worth speaking of, and they 
are not contributions to scientific knowledge in 
any strict sense. Some will dismiss them with 
a sneer, as mere popularizations, as a sort of jug- 
gling with other men's ideas. This contemptu- 
ous procedure, it need hardly be said, gets no 
sympathy from us, and it is as distinctly wrong- 
headed as the attempt, already discussed, to clas- 
sify such books as c Man's Place in Nature ' and 
1 The Physical Basis of Life ' among important 
scientific works. 

Wherein, then, lies the value of these nine 
volumes of essays, if it is inadequate to consider 
them as mere popularizations, however skilful, 
and quite wrong to call them contributions to 
science ? We should say that the first and most 
important claim to be made for them is that they 
reveal a strong philosophical thinker; that be- 
neath their graceful rhetoric and acute dialectic 
there is a method of fundamental importance, 



258 Little Leaders 

clearly conceived, and rigorously applied to the 
special subject, whatever it may be, under con- 
sideration. What that method is may be seen 
plainly enough in any one among half a dozen of 
the more formal discussions ; most plainly, per- 
haps, in the noble essay, dated 1870, upon the 
' Discours de la Methode ' of Descartes. In- 
deed, the author recognized the principle above 
stated as constituting the unifying element in his 
seemingly so diversified work when he gave to 
the initial volume of the revised edition of the 
c Essays ' the significant title c Method and Re- 
sults.' And this title might have been made to 
cover the whole collection, for we find, whether 
the subject of an essay be c Man's Place in Na- 
ture ' or c Evolution and Ethics,' the story of 
the Gadarene swine or the organization of the 
State, that the discussion always proceeds upon 
well-defined lines, and with close reference to a 
controlling organon. It was no vagary, as some 
of his readers thought, when he turned from his 
anatomical studies to write for the c English Men 
of Letters ' a philosophical analysis of the work 
of Hume ; it was rather an indication of the real 
bent of his mind, which always looked beyond 






In Memoriam 259 

the half-unified knowledge of science to the fully- 
unified knowledge that we call philosophy. 

The healthy English mind is not distinguished 
by an aptitude for metaphysics, and Huxley's 
mind was distinctly of the healthy English type. 
He was content with a method, when a French- 
man or a German would have been satisfied with 
nothing short of a system. Hence, he was willing 
to leave many of the questions of philosophy un- 
answered, content to carry his method as far it 
would go, and to admit ignorance of the regions 
beyond. He even coined a word with which to 
name this philosophical attitude, and the imme- 
diate adoption and currency of that word showed 
that it met a long-felt want. Since it came into 
our circulation, agnosticism, like many other 
words, has been used as a counter by wise men 
and as a full- weight coin by fools, but it has jus- 
tified itself, on the whole, as a useful addition to 
our philosophical terminology. 

The lectures and writings of our arch-agnostic 
have, during the past forty years, aroused a good 
many religious antagonisms ; some of these have 
become allayed by time, and some are still active. 
It took a bold Englishman in the sixties to cham- 



260 Little Leaders 

pion the Darwinian doctrine of descent and to 
combat the grotesque Miltonic theory of crea- 
tion ; but Huxley was never lacking in courage, 
and he bore without flinching the brunt of theo- 
logical attack and vilification. The world — that 
is, all the world worth considering — came round 
to his side sooner than could have been anticipated 
by a student of the history of new and fruitful 
ideas — of their long hard struggle with ignorance, 
and blindness, and all the banded legions of the 
old order of thought — and the last score of years 
left to the stout-hearted philosopher were serene 
with the satisfaction of complete achievement in 
at least one important field of his endeavor. But 
the theory of creation was not the onlv strong- 
hold occupied by the popular theology of his 
fellow-countrymen, and, when that was battered 
down, there were others to be attacked. All 
these assaults were not, of course, directed against 
religion at all, any more than were the Voltairean 
assaults of a century previous, and the infame that 
Huxley sought to crush in the world of thought 
was as little deserving of consideration as was the 
engine of political and social despotism which 
Voltaire's memorable and magnificent crusade did 






In Memoriam 261 

so much to demolish. We should say that Hux- 
ley, far from being an enemy of religion, was one 
of the best friends it has ever found, and we 
have no doubt that, from the more enlightened 
twentieth-century religious point of view, he will 
be remembered as such. 

For our part the aspect of Huxley's life and 
work that compels the deepest gratitude is the 
absolute honesty by which that life and that work 
were characterized throughout. One does not 
need to accept all of his conclusions to admire 
the intellectual process by which they were 
reached. His logic may now and then have been 
at fault, but it scorned every species of sophis- 
tical subterfuge. To get at the truth, not merely 
to make a better-sounding argument than his op- 
ponent, was always his aim. He hated shams as 
Carlyle hated them, but, instead of inveighing at 
them with stormy prophecy ( c I am not equal to 
the prophetical business ' ), he employed the bet- 
ter weapon of compactly-wrought argumentation. 
Very recently, taking a retrospective view of his 
life, he made this statement of what had been its 
aims and its guiding principles : 

* Men are said to be partial judges of themselves. 



262 Little Leaders 

Young men may be, I doubt if old men are. Life seems 
terribly foreshortened as they look back, and the moun- 
tain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be 
a mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges when, with 
failing breath, they reach the top. But if I may speak 
of the objects I have had more or less definitely in view 
since I began the ascent of my hillock, they are briefly 
these: To promote the increase of natural knowledge, 
and to forward the application of scientific methods of 
investigation to all the problems of life, to the best of my 
ability, in the conviction, which has grown with my 
growth and strengthened with my strength, that there is 
no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except verac- 
ity of thought and action, and the resolute facing of the 
world as it is, when the garment of make-believe by 
which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is 
stripped off. It is with this intent that I have subordi- 
nated any reasonable, or unreasonable, ambition for sci- 
entific fame which I may have permitted myself to enter- 
tain, to other ends; to the popularization of science; to 
the development and organization of scientific education; 
to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolu- 
tion ; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical 
spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere 
else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the 
deadly enemy of science.' 

It is a noble apologia pro vita sua, ana the world 
will not readily forget what it owes to this man's 



In Memoriam 263 

single-hearted devotion to truth. His tombstone 
should bear the inscription, Veritatem dilexi^ that 
Renan asked to be cut upon his own, and the 
measure of his delight in the truth should be the 
measure of posterity's delight in cherishing his 
memory. 



264 Little Leaders 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

The last of the famous group of New Englanders 
who made the dream of American literature a 
fact, the last man of letters to survive from that 
annus mirabilh which also gave to America Lin- 
coln and Poe, to England Tennyson and Darwin, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes has stolen peacefully to 
his rest, and we have indeed broken with the past. 
Few lives have meant so much to Americans as 
that now ended, its years so nearly those of the 
century which it adorned. As the intellectual 
associates of the gentle Autocrat went to their 
own places one by one, the affection in which 
they were held seemed to be transferred to the 
ever-lessening group of those who yet remained, 
until, in concentration of grateful recollection, it 
was all heaped upon one beloved head. Now, 
there remain but memories to which we may 
cling ; the last leaf has fallen from c the old for- 
saken bough,' and we smile, as he bade us do, 
but through our tears. 



In Memoriam 265 

The love which Americans have felt, and 
always will feel, for the group of our distinctively 
national poets, including Bryant and Longfellow, 
Whittier and Lowell, besides the one whose loss 
we now mourn, has had few parallels in other 
nations for either depth or sincerity. We knew 
that they were not great poets, as the world 
measures poetic greatness ; we knew that their 
voices were not of those that for all ages speak 
to all mankind ; but they have had for us so 
many endearing associations, their names have 
been so indissolubly linked with whatever was 
best and noblest in our history and our aspira- 
tions, that we could not wholly measure them by 
the cold standards of objective criticism. The 
indigenous nature-lyrics of Bryant, Longfellow's 
delicate treatment of the romantic aspects of 
American history, the passion that fired Whit- 
tier's songs of freedom, and the ethical fervor 
and downright manliness to which Lowell gave 
such varied utterance, — all these things meant 
something to us, something very precious, very 
personal, and altogether incommunicable to the 
alien. So we did not mind it very much when 
the amiable foreign critic told us that most of our 



266 Little Leaders 

poets were either mocking-birds or corn-crakes. 
We knew that it would be useless to explain or 
to remonstrate; we knew, in fact, that his lan- 
guage and his tests were not ours, nor ours his. 
The work of Holmes, besides having qualities 
peculiarly its own, shares also in the special ap- 
peals indicated above. There is no lack of lyrical 
or romantic effect, of patriotic or ethical passion, 
in the long series of volumes that began with the 
'Poems' of 1836 and ended with 'Before the 
Curfew' in 1888. And how much there is that 
falls without the categories thus summarily desig- 
nated ! 

1 What shapes and fancies, grave or gay, 

Before us at his bidding come! 
The Treadmill tramp, the One-Horse Shay, 
The dumb despair of Elsie's doom! 

« The tale of Avis and the Maid, 

The plea for lips that cannot speak, 
The holy kiss that Iris laid 

On little Boston's pallid cheek!* 

And then Holmes was so much more than a 
mere singer. The very fact that we most fre- 
quently call him the Autocrat rather than the 
poet suggests something of his versatile ability. 



In Memoriam 267 

With one aspect of his life-work we are not 
here concerned. As a medical practitioner, as a 
teacher of anatomy, and as a writer in the special 
field of his profession, he had a full and honorable 
career, and we may fancy that he more than once 
said to the physician Holmes, This is what I 
really am, the rest is trifling ; just as Lamb said 
of his India House folios, 'These are my real 
works.' 

But we may put all this aside, and the man of 
letters remains, not sensibly diminished in stature. 
For to his credit stand many entries. There are 
the three novels, and of them we must say that 
they have few equals in our American fiction. 
c A Mortal Antipathy ' we might perhaps spare, 
but we would not willingly lose ' Elsie Venner,' 
even if science frown upon its thesis, or c The 
Guardian Angel,' even if it do not in all respects 
fulfil the requirements of the fictive art. We 
should say that no reservations need be made 
when it is a question of praising the four volumes 
of Table-Talk, which begin with the breakfast- 
table and end with the tea-cups. And besides 
these gifts, he gave us the sympathetic and beau- 
tiful memoirs of Motley and Emerson, and the 



268 Little Leaders 

many prose miscellanies that are only less charm- 
ing than his more famous works. 

As a poet — and in the final settlement the 
poet will outweigh the writer of prose — Holmes 
preserved for us the spirit of the classical age at 
a time when romanticism was in full cry. But, 
as Mr. Stedman happily suggests, his work was 
a survival rather than a revival. It is curious, 
indeed, as the same acute critic remarks, to note 
how persistently he remained an artificer upon 
the old-fashioned lines, although ever alert to 
seize the new occasion and the new theme. We 
have had no other so expert in personal and oc- 
casional verse, no other who could so distil the 
very quintessence of Yankee humor, or of the 
other and finer qualities of the New England in- 
tellect, into the most limpid of song. And when 
he was entirely serious, how exquisite was his 
touch, how pure his pathos, how clear his ethical 
sense ! Let ' The Voiceless,' ' Under the Vio- 
lets,' and ' The Chambered Nautilus ' bear wit- 
ness. And, since no one knew so well as he 
the word most fit to be spoken upon any sol- 
emn occasion, let us write in his own words his 
epitaph : 



In Memoriam 269 

« Say not the Poet dies ! 
Though in the dust he lies, 
He cannot forfeit his melodious breath, 

Unsphered by envious death! 
Life drops the voiceless myriads from its roll; 
Their fate he cannot share, 
Who, in the enchanted air 
Sweet with the lingering strains that Echo stole, 
Has left his dearer self, the music of his soul! 

« He sleeps; he cannot die! 
As evening's long-drawn sigh, 
Lifting the rose-leaves on his peaceful mound, 

Spreads all their sweets around, 
So, laden with his song, the breezes blow 
From where the rustling sedge 
Frets our rude ocean's edge 
To the smooth sea beyond the peaks of snow. 
His soul the air enshrines and leaves but dust below! ' 



270 Little Leaders 



WILLIAM FREDERICK POOLE. 

In the death of Dr. Poole American history lost 
one of its best equipped and most painstaking 
students, the profession of librarianship one of its 
foremost exponents, and c The Dial' one of its 
stanchest friends and most valued contributors. 
Although he had made his home for some years 
past in the university suburb of Evanston, a few 
miles from Chicago, his work was done in the 
latter city, which for twenty years reckoned him 
among its most distinguished citizens. The num- 
ber of persons who, in this great community, are 
identified with intellectual rather than with mate- 
rial interests is still relatively so small that the 
disappearance from our midst of so commanding 
a figure as that of Dr. Poole is a public loss more 
grievous than it would be in many other places. 
His death leaves a social vacancy not easily to be 
filled, even from the public point of view ; from 
that of the friends who have loved and honored 



In Memoriam 271 

him for so many years, the mere suggestion of 
its ever being filled is a mockery. 

William Frederick Poole was born at Salem, 
Massachusetts, December 24, 1821, thus being 
at the time of his death seventy-two years of age. 
The annals of his career may be briefly chron- 
icled. He entered Yale College in 1842, and 
was graduated in 1849. This period includes an 
interregnum of three years spent in earning the 
money needed to complete his college education. 
President Timothy Dwight, of Yale University, 
was one of his classmates. From the time of 
graduation from college to the close of his career, 
the story of his life, viewed externally, is little 
more than a statement of the various libraries 
that he was called upon to direct or to organize. 
He was an assistant librarian in the Boston 
Athenaeum from 1850 to 1852; Librarian of 
the Boston Mercantile Library from 1852 to 
1856; Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum from 
1856 to 1869; and Librarian of the Cincinnati 
Public Library from 1869 to 1874. Called, in 
1873, to the work of organizing the Chicago 
Public Library, he entered upon that task early 



272 Little Leaders 

in 1874, and remained at the head of the Chi- 
cago institution until 1887, when he was called 
upon to undertake the task of organizing the 
reference library endowed by the late Walter L. 
Newberry, of Chicago, and known by the name 
of its generous founder. During the nearly seven 
years that he lived to act as the director of that 
institution, he collected for its uses nearly one 
hundred thousand volumes, and lived to superin- 
tend their transfer to the magnificent new build- 
ing which is to be the permanent home of the 
Library. 

Librarianship, in this country, has during the 
past twenty years become one of the learned 
professions ; that it has become so is due in very 
great measure to the efforts of Dr. Poole. To 
secure for his fellow-workers the recognition ac- 
corded to the clergyman, the lawyer, and the 
physician ; to substitute the trained bibliographer 
for the mere custodian of books ; to establish 
professional schools of librarianship; to make 
the public familiar with the principles of rational 
library architecture ; to facilitate access to collec- 
tions of books, and to enlarge their usefulness by 
library helps prepared by the cooperation of bib- 



In Memoriam 273 

liographers — these were, briefly stated, the aims 
towards whose accomplishment he devoted, for a 
full half-century, an exceptionally active and in- 
dustrious life. He was a member of the New 
York Convention of Librarians held in 1853, 
the first convention of the sort ever held any- 
where. He helped organize the American Library 
Association in 1876, was one of the Presidents 
of that body, and attended all but one of its 
annual meetings. He represented this country 
at the first International Conference of Libra- 
rians, held in London in 1877, and was, in 1893, 
at the head of the World's Congress Auxiliary 
Literary Congresses, one of which was an Inter- 
national Congress of Librarians. The papers 
published by him upon professional subjects are 
very numerous, but are difficult of access. These 
papers ought to be collected, for they contain 
much material of permanent value. 

As a librarian, Dr. Poole's methods were 
characterized by sagacious practicality and clear 
common sense. He mistrusted the elaborate 
scientific systems now in vogue with our younger 
bibliographers — systems which are excellent for 
the uses of the librarian, but sadly perplexing to 



274 Little Leaders 

most of the people for whom libraries are col- 
lected. His methods of classification and cata- 
logue-making were to a certain extent empirical, 
and not a little is to be said on behalf of empiri- 
cism in such matters. He never lost sight of the 
fundamental principle that books are meant to be 
used ; that their chief end is not attained when 
they are catalogued and shelved. He wanted 
the public to use the books under his charge, 
and encouraged such use in many ways. He 
welcomed the work of University Extension, and 
tried to make the public library a helpful adjunct 
to that work. And long before University Ex- 
tension was talked about in this country, he 
sought to bring the school into more intimate 
relations with the library, and arranged for bib- 
liographical talks to students, illustrated by the 
literature of the subjects talked about. 

Such a collection of Dr. Poole's bibliograph- 
ical papers as we have suggested would be a 
worthy monument to his memory. But a still 
worthier monument already exists in the shape 
of the great l Index to Periodical Literature.' 
The author began this important work as a stu- 
dent, when he was acting as librarian of a college 



In Memoriam 275 

society. Its first edition was printed in 1848, 
making an octavo of 154 pages. In 1853 it 
reappeared in an octavo of more than th$ee times 
the thickness of the earlier volume. In 1882 
(the author having meanwhile secured the coop- 
eration of a number of his fellow-librarians) it 
made its third and final appearance, again multi- 
plied threefold as to the number of pages, and 
much more than that as to the quantity of mat- 
ter. Two supplements have since been pub- 
lished, with the cooperation of Mr. W. I. Fletcher, 
bringing it down to 1892. 

As a student of history, Dr. Poole devoted 
himself chiefly to subjects connected with the 
early settlement of this country. His c Anti- 
Slavery Opinions before 1800 ' is a valuable con- 
tribution to the history of the c peculiar institu- 
tion ' in America. His paper on c The Popham 
Colony ' discussed certain conflicting claims be- 
tween Maine and Massachusetts as to priority of 
settlement, deciding in favor of the latter. He 
investigated the history of the Northwestern Or- 
dinance and the connection therewith of Man- 
asseh Cutler, making himself the recognized au- 
thority upon that important subject. He pricked 



276 Little Leaders 

the bubbles of the Pocahontas story and of the 
Mecklenburg Declaration so effectively that they 
were relegated to the realm of myth, and are not 
likely again to find serious defenders. He pub- 
lished valuable studies in the history of the early 
Northwest. Most important, perhaps, of all his 
studies were those relating to early Massachusetts 
history, and especially to the Mathers and the 
subject of witchcraft. These subjects were 
assigned to him in c The Memorial History of 
Boston,' and were frequently discussed by him 
elsewhere. He did much to correct the erroneous 
popular estimate of Cotton Mather, showing him 
to have been learned, sagacious, and tolerant, 
free from responsibility 7 for the witchcraft delu- 
sion, and a commanding figure worthy of the 
respect and admiration of posterity. In this, as 
in other instances, Dr. Poole, himself a descend- 
ant of the Puritans, stoutly defended his ances- 
tors against the misrepresentations under which 
they have suffered. Another piece of historical 
work, possibly the most important done by him, 
was his lengthy historical and critical introduc- 
tion to the reprint of Captain Edward Johnson's 
c Wonder- Working Providence of Sion's Saviour 






In Memoriam 277 

in New England.' These numerous historical 
studies, no less than those devoted to the profes- 
sional work of the librarian, are so scattered as to 
be difficult of access, and richly deserve collec- 
tion and publication in permanent form. 

Many of Dr. Poole's historical papers were 
contributed to' the journal upon which now de- 
volves the sad task of paying a tribute to his 
memory, and it was through his good offices 
that the contents of ' The Dial ' were, from the 
start, included in the great c Index.' The first 
number of The Dial' appeared in May, 1880, 
and the first article in that number was a review, 
by Dr. Poole, of the new edition of Hildreth. 
His latest contribution, which was probably the 
last piece of work done by him, was a vigorous 
defense of the Puritans of which our readers will 
hardly need to be reminded. Between these two 
contributions, upwards of thirty others from his; 
pen appeared in the pages of c The Dial ' ; con- 
tributions devoted, almost without exception, to 
subjects in American history. Whatever might 
be his subject, the forcible and picturesque qual- 
ities of his style could not fail to be impressive, 
and the pages that he wrote, however aggressive 



278 Little Leaders 

and tending to excite opposition, always held the 
attention, and were never invaded by anything 
remotely suggestive of dulness. 

The bibliographer and the historical student 
combined in William Frederick Poole were 
known to the world ; something better than 
these, the man himself, was known to his friends. 
The brusqueness of his manner, at first a little 
repellant to those who came into contact with 
him, was sqpn seen to be but the outward ex- 
pression of a mental habit of the rarest sincerity. 
And upon those who had the privilege of his in- 
timacy was made the impression, dominant above 
all others, of his absolute integrity, intellectual 
and moral. They realized that here was a man 
who simply could not think one thing and say 
another, or swerve by so much as a finger's 
breadth from what he believed to be the right 
course, were the matter in question great or 
small. Such men are none too common in the 
world, and when one of them leaves it, his place, 
for those who have really known him, is not 
likely to be filled again. 



printed for wav and williams 
by r. r. donnelley and sons co 
at the lakeside press, chicago 
from plates made by the dial 
press: mdcccxcv 



r 



